Dream Stars

Those lines, say, on stars:
the hell with the stars.
They were about the perception of the stars.
—Franz Wright, Another Working Dawn—

Are the stars
still blazing away,
all those happy little dream stars
in their empty blue somewhere?

Once I knew about stars,
those endless blue holes in the cold night sky,
how they burned God’s fingertips
when he tried
to move them
from one little dream
to another.

O! stars of silent sapphire dreams
please gleam and glitter and scream
now and then:

warn me

before you decide to

return to

my dreams.

At the Beach

The breeze is blue off the lake,
the shadow of the willow the green of forever
and the goldfinch in the blueberry bush
a yellow sun-bright song.

Maybe gray is incurable
but when yellow and green dance out and vanish
over deep blue blindness
let me lean into fog,
sink into gray,
summon color for my poem.