You once told me that stars were wind-borne
crystallizations of human hope and desire
and the fact that they were so many showed
what prayerful, sorrowful bastards we were.
You were animated, that night, looking north,
toward Toronto, past the lakeshore, and the
numbing lapidarity of the water.
I think you were high that night –
off life probably, but it didn't matter.
You barely recognized me, and yourself
not at all.
You had a rose woven into the dark braid
of your hair
that you had bought from a street vendor earlier that day
and what I remember best from
that night is how
it drooped,
the petals falling away from the tightly wound core,
the stamen showing itself in the moonlight
to be little more than an over-sexed filament connecting you
to the earth, and by extension, to me.
I loved you, for a long time after,
just because of the rose, and because of the
definition you gave me, of stars, and
that of yourself,
“A rambling moll dedicated to the universe”
and because when you left,
not two weeks later you left me
a drawing, a note,
and the same dried rose,
you on a spaceship riding to the stars,
“Gone home. Back soon.”