Stars

Robert Lowell

I
Caged in fiction’s iron bars,
I give this voice to you
with tragic diction to rebuke the stars —
it isn’t you, and yet it’s you.

“Will you, like Goethe, fall
to oblivion in my arms;
then talk about the stars?
Say they light militant campfires,
storm heaven while I sleep?
Not now —
my spine is hurting me,
I can only lie face down,
a gross weight innocent —
if you will let me sleep —
of seduction, speech, or pain.
I’m too drugged to do anything,
or help you watch the sky.
I am indifferent to the stars —
their ranks are too docile and mathematical
to regroup if once scattered
like comatose sheep . . .
I am indifferent —
what woman has the measure of a man,
who only h as to care about himself
and follow the stars’
extravagant, useless journey across the sky,
to divert me from the absence of the sun?
Because they cannot love, they need no love.”


II
If you heard God is dead,
the old monopolist,
who made us to take us apart —
would you stand upright in spite of your spine?

“I sleep,
an old walnut soaked in rum,
too slippery for the stars to crack
in their rigid, identical glass wheels . . .
If God is dead,
how can I be certain another old man
will drop again from the stars,
from sixty thousand fathoms away,
and halt by the post of my bed —
motionless with ill-omened power?
A new old lover
might hurt a thousand times worse . . .
But my beloved
is godlike, tantalizing,
made in the image of a man
too young to be frightened of women.
He can only appear in all my dreams.”

I<3u