AQUARIUS
Water-bearer:
constellation of your birth.
Not a womb, but a jar,
not a woman,
but a man waiting
to water the heart of winter.
Let me imagine Aquarius
as a doctor, since I’m an unbeliever
in signs but not of similitudes—
the power to see ourselves
in sculpted figures, caged
in stars. Desperate to be seen
myself, I envy the one
who saw you first—Aquarius
in the room where you emerged
and reddened the season,
a red flicker, a meteor,
a slap on the back, the aftermath
of origin, that brief moment
of unseasonable color
before the flood. But the truth
is Aquarius only intimates
water—suggests the possibility of thaw—
the jar at an impossible pitch.
I saw it tilting away from us,
relief in retrograde, and with it
the slosh of time I received
with you who made me.
I, too, was like water,
unable to attach, coursing
under the center of a frozen lake,
that cannot reach the surface.
INTO THE MATTER
In a city without snow
I find myself trying to startle
a miracle—to see my father
in the drowned shimmer
of a highway mirage.
Make the appearance of water
his last winter, a distant pane.
Look at me, it gleams,
disappearing upon approach.
Come back, come back.
I believe in angles—
the way they change
course suddenly
and without regard
for witnesses, like a finger
passing through a flame
or the hands on a clock
pulling apart the hour.
Image Credit: “Water” by Johann Justin Preissler (Public Domain) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
