A Poem by Christina Murphy

Dappled Stars

 

We are searching for wildflowers on a misty day.

 

We are walking, and I am wishing you would tell me

something you want me to hear, but I have made my peace

with our silences. Our lives have become coextensive orbits,

visible, but not in range in any meaningful way

beyond our mundane daily rhythms.    

The trail is streaked with wildflowers captured by the wind. 

I would like the wildflowers to be like gems—stationary

against all the changes of times and seasons that will come

to claim them as fragile beings. And I would like my heart

to be motionless on this spring day in which the weight

of the mountains against the horizon is almost unbearable.   

 

Soon you have found the wildflower you love most

for its gentle blue color that makes it look as if

the sky bent down for a moment and lost itself in mystery.

 

The blue wildflower and the blue sky that we are tempted

to think of as one even though the blues do not touch,

and the blue sky seems another illusory world away

filled with dappled stars and incandescent meanings.

 

The mist is now rain, steady with a soft

drumbeat of insistence. You draw your jacket

tight and brace yourself against the wet winds

as I watch the wildflowers get beaten down, as if

their colors were tears draining off into the land.

 

I reach for your hand and hold it, feeling the coldness

the wind and rain have instilled. For a moment, my sight

is blurred by rain or perhaps by tears, but everything

is silent, and I would like to believe that we can escape

our sad hollowness of spirit.

 

I am hoping for this as I listen to my heartbeat,

my own pulse, and wish that the

chill of icy rain could comfort me and pass for feeling.

 

 

 

Christina Murphy’s poems have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including, most recently, Cease, Cows, Chicago Literati, and Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure.