"Figure"

"Figure"

Josephine Miles

 

A poem I keep forgetting to write

Is about the stars,

How I see them in their order

Even without the chair and bear and the sisters,

In their astronomic presence of great space,

And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving,

Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure.

Having not mathematics, my head

Bursts with anguish of not understanding.

The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments

Of a tortured victim, far from me

In his galaxy of minds bent upon him,

In the oblivion of his headline status

Crumpled and exploding as incomparable

As a star, yet present in its light.

I forget to write.

 

via Poetry Foundation