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Eternal Stargazing

by Patrick Granger
Chapter 1
The night was a steel guitar laid flat across the county,
each star a finger pressing down,
fretting the silence until it moaned.

She and I climbed into the back of the truck,
the bed still warm from the engine,
and the sky leaned down like a roofless chapel.
Her breath rose slow,
sweet as the first note of a hymn,
and I thought even the coyotes went quiet to hear it.

Then the streak came.
One light sliding out of its place,
cutting through the heavens like a bow over gut-strings.
She touched my hand,
and the heat of it carried further than fire.
She told me to shut my eyes,
and so I did,
because love is closing your eyes
when someone else says the world is listening.

I will not tell what I asked for.
That belongs only to the fire.
But it left a weight in me,
the way a struck chord keeps humming
long after the player has gone.

Since that night I have heard it everywhere.
In the buzz of the motel sign
flickering outside the station.
In the hum of the power lines
dragging their voices through the wheat.
In the long whistle of trains
that no longer stop in town.

Sometimes I wonder if we bound ourselves too tight.
If the wish pulled a knot the heavens never meant to tie.
A rope stretched from her heart to mine,
drawn so hard it sings.
A song too bright to last,
and too sharp to let go.

The memory is not gentle.
It rattles like an old fiddle dropped on stone,
splintered but still alive with music.
It creeps in the corners of sleep,
and I wake with the taste of ash in my mouth,
as though the star burned all the way through me
and left me hollow for its flame.

Yet I call it beautiful.
Cosmically, terribly beautiful.
Because she was beside me,
because the sky bent to us for one brief moment,
because even now when I close my eyes,
I can feel her hand still warm against mine,
and the world holding its breath
as if it knew what we had asked.

What I do know, was in that night,
somewhere underneath the stars,
somewhere by the rushing river,
I fell in love with the woman of my dreams again.
I never want to let that go.