Where Heaven Should Be

If I could unfold the harvest sky,
and peel away the stippled black
weave, stretch my fingers between
the warped steely dimensions of dark,
I would cup a torn piece of its pulsing
tapestry in my sugar-high hands.

I would walk through the fraying fabric,
each foot heavy with green Venusian
dust, turn around and slowly stare.
My eye, a web, netting in the fire
flies and cramped solar winds, would
free the Taurusian bull to stampede in
full-moon fields, fenceless.

Behind me, outside, my side…
a stair of silken rock, marked by sifted
carnes, hugs mirages of stone and lace,
cascades between molting orange larches
and liquid blue falls. Small and thin,
a line of dust through a forest of gods,
the trail erodes with only paw prints
and fallen snags for company.

A constellation, safe in the sky, I would quit
the Twins and Crab and endless rings
of ice and moonstones, wrap up the harvest
sky again, creases gently ironed flat,
and spend my days with you, a torn piece
of September’s frost-embroidered tapestry.