Still Looking Up…

The night comes down like a gentle hand,
the way you'd rest it on my shoulder, and
the porch light dims and the crickets thin
and the whole sky opens and lets me in.

I take the corner where the cold air sits,
the one you claimed for the view of it,
and I count the stars the way you taught,
each one a word the silence caught.

Orion leans where he always leaned,
the Dipper tilts like a ladle's gleam,
and somewhere past the Pleiades' dust
there burns a light older than both of us.

You'd name them all. You'd say, Look there,
that one's been burning a million years.
It's dead already, and still it shines.
And you'd laugh like a bell through the pines.

Funny, the things a person keeps.
your chipped mug, your socks, the way you'd sleep
with the window cracked in the dead of cold,
small proofs that a heart can't be fully told.

And I wonder, now, in this hush of hours,
if somewhere you're standing beneath these stars,
looking back the way I'm looking up,
both of us lifting the same cold cup.

If you are a star, be a gentle one.
If you are a wind, find my window and come.
If you're only gone, then let that be,
and let the sky keep doing this to me.

Some nights I ask. Some nights I don't.
Some nights an answer comes. Some nights won't.
But the sky's a door that never shuts,
so I'll keep the light on. I'll keep looking up.