2 Poems

Star Gazing 1

                                               —after Ida O’Keeffe, “Star Gazing in Texas, 1938”

The earth spins below in a vast roundness:

Fields, barns askew in their roll to the edge

which is no edge, only the steady turn

of the terrain on which you have walked out

into this night lit by star-shine and swaths

of the moon’s luster bathing the corral

in light, the clodded ground, the gentle beasts,

two horses in vigil at the fence gap,

staring at the hilltop where you ascend

to plant your bare feet on the mound of dirt

and stretch your slender neck, straining for sky.

Arms upraised, you ease back your head into

the cradle your hands form, at ease knowing

that here it is you who are the still point.

(first appeared, Route 7 Review 12)

Star Gazing 2

                                               —after Ida O’Keeffe, “Star Gazing in Texas, 1938”

The lure of light as it lavishes lifts

you upward from the dark. The rude hilltop

should be yours alone, as is the rapture

that holds fast your sight to the night sky and

this rare glow of soft luster descending.

So dear it is that nothing else matters now,

not these two boys playing at your feet

for whom not much matters at all except

the rough-house romp and tumbling roll back down

the steep hill where they would have ruled as kings.

Eyes covered and sightless, they are blind boys

in a child’s game, heedless of heaven’s night-

nod to these Texas plains and the thin-lined

horizon that has just come within reach.

(first appeared, Route 7 Review 12)

Karl Plank is the author of The Grace of Falling Things (Grayson Books, 2024) and, in a more academic context, The Fact of the Cage: Reading and Redemption in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (Routledge, 2021). His poetry has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, and Notre Dame Review and has been featured on Poetry Daily. He is the J.W. Cannon Professor of Religion, Emeritus, at Davidson College.