Barbara Daniels
Watersky
Stars lie down in pages of books, cling to their places in ice-crystal spheres. You ride now in a boat without oars, ash on the water thrown to the night. Stars form their constellations— a dragon, a lion, a queen. They’re doing the slow work of dreaming. Earth rolls toward the solstice, the light-filled month you didn’t live to. It seems now there’s no proof of anything. I fall to my knees to turn through boxes of useless books. I’ve read that a dark stain in polar skies means open water, a cloud reflecting the water’s blackness. They call it watersky, friend, and you float there out at the shadow line beyond the high windows.
Barbara Daniels’ chapbooks Black Sails and Quinn and Marie are available from Casa de Cinco Hermanas and her book Rose Fever: Poems from WordTech Press. Her poetry has appeared in Mid-Atlantic Review, Solstice, The Literary Review and many other journals. She earned an MFA from Vermont College.
