We have known each other quite some time,
you and I, dear Orion;
you are the only constellation I can consistently find,
your belt your standard-bearer.
Daily I spoke to you, and heard you answer,
the words I put in your mouth making
a dollhouse world where things were
small for a small one,
personal for someone who knew her dolls by name.
We spoke on winter mornings when all else was
sleeping, distant,
and on summer nights when things were closer somehow.
You pointed to the fireflies,
smiling benevolently at their flickers
and at me as I giggled and chased them,
knowing as I didn't that it was you,
your belt, that they were mimicking.
When I couldn't see you
in the daylight,
I wrote you letters instead.
You must have gotten sick of first
my print, and then my elementary
cursive sprawling across the page,
but patiently you still accepted them
though you lacked the will and the right
to give me replies.
I am older now, and not so naive,
my cursive much neater,
though even now I still greet you,
waving upward with some remnant of that childlike
trust that where you watched
there could be no harm.
I know you are older still than I, but --
it was my kind that made you, that put their stories
to your stars,
that took faraway dots and named them Orion.
You knew this, too, and never told me.
At an impasse such as this, our recognitions
in passing now must be
faint but fond: a brief nod,
a flash of a smile,
a wry flicker of the features.
I won't be writing to you very much anymore,
dear Orion, though please
don't think me rude or ungrateful.
I am still so fond of you.
I am still so humbled by you.
I will still watch your steps,
even when mine go elsewhere.
I will still smile up at you
in the intimacy of night.
I will still say hello-up-there,
and thank-you, and rest-well.
I can still sense your distant,
faint benevolence.
The tears on this page
glimmer, your own fallen eyes.
I wish you could still see me.
Sincerely.
Back to Stuff I Wrote.
© Cynthia 2003.