Andrew Rea

Faust on a Hill in Humboldt Park

Say the night sky is waiting to be annexed, stars sold
to the highest bidder. You would name yours Goethe,
and find him when you could bribe the clouds
to loiter on the stoop of Betelgeuse or the Seven Sisters.

Would he approve of such a thing, climbing from Weimar
and its Corinthian posture, above the heap of us and into
the branches of an ash tree, and from there, scaling
sturdy rungs of air to take his place as a burning ball of gas?

Like testing the faultiness of cliffs above epic churning seas,
or the taut space pulled between my sly American fingers,
I am working from the bottom up to understand
our geography here, thrust through the head of a pin.

I watch you sink beneath the wet ground, damned
to the darkness of evening histories, impossible
to break from except in the pattern of veins in a single
leaf of grass, the brilliant scapula of Orion’s shoulder.

It is the strength of this season to blind us all,
and when there is nothing to suck out of the sky
anymore where will you turn? To these jagged
sawblades of fescue, or to the palms of your own hands?