Friday Love Poem: John Beck!

Orion

You’re asleep in the passenger seat, so it’s just Orion and me and the long empty highway stretching back to New Jersey. No ballgame, no radio, no cell phones; although the tower lights beckon down 81 South. They twinkle at me, a constellation in reverse, too close to be any more than they seem.

Orion and I wonder whether you’re dreaming big or little dreams?

I dream of stars some nights, of their spinning song, sung although sound cannot carry in vacuum. Like your dreaming, I’d have to get so close to hear that I’d be destroyed, combust and scatter as star dust scarred with the single truest note ever roared in the fission furnace, and race through the void on a solar flare as testament to brilliance; I think it might be worth it, but that doesn’t seem like the sort of dream you’d have.

Maybe it’s the dream of a girl being carried home again, to be woken with kisses when we park near our apartment, to stagger sleepy-eyed through the first hints of frost and up those stairs, to fall contented into my radiator arms and bury her face in the familiar pillow.

I follow Orion in the rear view mirror while the tires sing their homeward song, and I know Orion sings too, the constellation’s dream song of greatness in parts, of dots to be connected, of harmony achieved through balance and imagination, of being more than a single star.

 John is newly married, and this poem was part of a chapbook gift to his bride. He believes in the communal power of board games, and of baseball. After years as a baseball blogger, he’s begun an art and life blog at http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/