Picaroon Poetry - Issue #8 - May 2017

Mothballing the observatory
Noel Williams
Confronting the attic
where only scraps of light remain
among the carrier bags and fairground toys,
I imagine planetoids of circling dust
massed at the pull and push of her heat
spun to her rays that burned through rock.
We’d taken slates, slashed the roof,
half-built a cantilevered frame. Sunlight’s
now irony, recolouring snapshots,
the astrolabe, backgammon pieces
stained with nail-varnish, unread Spenser,
Tarot cards, a dress faded as a burnt moth.
This press of objects and heavy time
that stoked desire, maps emptiness.
Our prismed vision bent all light.
Now memory’s fantastic as her heron ghost,
a tawdry gaze dazzled by fireworks,
startling and sparking and here and gone
whilst nothing happens on the ground.
The secrets I searched for lie here
in plain view. The sky’s not blue.
There is no sky. The stars long ran
from where we put them.
The fires of Venus, ice of Mars, steel clouds of Jupiter
and Saturn’s ring of knives are tricks I’ve played
to hide my accidental birth.
My mother left me staring at the sun.
My father stuffed night in his pillow.
And when a silver bird stooped to me from her sky
that was no syzygy but a casual touch
swapping moments of loneliness,
children’s marbles spinning in a hole.