Part I: Yin/Falling Like a Star

The sort of child

To plant your first lost tooth,

Growing a playmate

Whose name you shared-

Only spoken backwards.

Riding your stallion out to sea.

Smudging the fairy’s ochre to your face.

Swooning at the May Queen’s banquet.

Under the full sky, drinking

Northern lights in one sip.

Light crushed, like flower juice,

Into black fabrics made of Space:

A throat full of sweet and stained glass.

Where were they?

When the air turned cold and hungered a bit?

“Gone,” the silence responded.

With a tattoo of absence

Gently where a finger tip might have rested

To give a memory of warmth.

Out you ran into winter descending.

Tears or wind clutching after you.

Part II: Yang/The Exegesis of the Star

The cold had a son.

You saw him counting birds and

As punishment, counting grains of snow.

This was on the property of a large abandoned estate.

Years had lost the secret rooms,

Statues in the courtyard surrendered to moss

As if to bend on one knee-

The heart shaped tin that held a child’s lock of hair, tarnished.

In haste you knock over the boy.

The star spills out of his skull.

The snow tastes itself and changes its flavor

To something warmer and of salt.

Light breaks.  Crisp shadows hold

The trees against the sky.

Your eyes entice the sun 

Brighter than the moon.