Con Stellations

Souvankham Thammavongsa in Small Arguments has a number of portraits of fruit. This one is not there. It shines in another galaxy. It comes from an earlier chapbook Still Life and provides a lovely coda to the suite of poems gathered therein.

"A Starfruit" has an epigraph from Nietzsche: "One must still have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

Its constellation is bounded / to ground / where you can reach / without the earn of sky // When you do this / time will be no birds / who will lose their navigation, / no boat will run off course, / no light lost to some farmer // There is no consequence / when you offer to plate / the stars / that do not come / from sky, from a chaos within

The "earn of sky" — one yearns for it. Like a debt balanced out.

And so for day 1469
21.12.2010