Night Letters (August 2020)
Dear—
Light can fall harsh as constant
noise They are setting up a perimeter
sure that no one can go unseen don’t
you want to feel safe and all that light
cuts through high on my skull behind my ears
sound that will not let me rest
I draft
letters to the school next door offer
shaded fixtures plead for nighthawks
drawn to the floodlights who catch
moths and grasshoppers lured there
every night an unnatural feast
that looks like joy
Who
will want to hear me tell them that I
prefer darkness long pellucid notes
of starlight which do not drive me
after my prey long past dusk but leave
a song spread over me sheer mist
like in the dream I have again and again
or that my mind returns to awake Rain
falling across the Tucson basin
or was it light so fine it did not break
open every surface but revived it full breadth
of desert between mountains whole
and that deep rest descending
It’s not
complaint but question What do you
remember of that dream the shared breath
of every being
Wakeful,
Night Letters (September 2020)
Dear—
What else but sky
filmed again with smoke the sun
an antique keyhole to a burning room
It leaves us raw this smoke blown
a thousand miles from California
these months of sickness we can’t bring ourselves
to agree on A remove of the heart
like this and the neighborhood can become
the world with its splendor and its trash
the worn edges decades leave
Last night
I walked into the darkness by which I mean
the haze of floodlights that never go out
I went out to ask is anyone there
shouting over the fence to my neighbor
who does not know my name begging him
to turn down La Traviata Verdi’s chords
waking me washing through
our bedroom walls the windows
left open for the night’s scant breeze
Everything is too much after months
of heat-struck skies the world burning
in more ways than one
I had basked
a few days before in unexpected coolness
imagining the smoke had become
a shade against the sun a gift to make
me forget all the loss I could not see So I raged
at the night turned stifling again at my neighbor’s
open door the orchestra over the radio
at full volume the morning coming
when I will feel again wrung out
by my own mind I too love the riotous
wash of strings I too am ferocious
in my claim to what I think is mine
Smoldering,
Ghazal to Map the Distance
Every morning, I swallow the full moon. The distance
between me and God contracts. Mountains spark on distance.
Tell me the story about night, the part where it flows
around concrete and steel, jackrabbits mapping false distance.
Discord, from the middle English. Standing apart. Emptied
space. Night’s spangled beauty making a Janus of distance.
Along the line, a nighthawk hunts by floodlight, skimming
razor wire and cleaved desert, at home in human distance.
April: I keep seeing the face of someone I know who is dead.
Words between the living distend. What do I know of distance?
We waited for the comet streak in the sky and were fooled,
twice, by airplanes, hurried descent cutting dusked distance.
Faced by this divide, arguments and questions fail me.
I know what you believe. I tighten my armor of distance.
What is the night made of? Dreams, perpetual expansion,
false dome of earth’s shadow above us, belling distance.
A hill rises, blocks the miles of lights near Naco. Night
encircles. I bless stars slipping through steeled distance.
Time’s void, ancient ties turned invalid, deep waters opening
between kin: intimate animal forms cut off by estranged distance.
How will we find our way back to one another? Teach me,
night creatures, to ride the currents, stars signaling across distance.
—————
Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of Pennsylvania Furnace (Unicorn Press, 2019), and co-editor of Beyond Earth's Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (University of Arizona Press, 2020). She has been a poet in residence at Gettysburg National Park and Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. She lives in Tucson and works as an archivist and librarian at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. www.julieswarstadjohnson.com