Page 179 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

George turned to his sweetheart of forty years, the woman we wondered why he

had never married, Marie, remember those shooting stars? Behind the barn?

Perseids.

Yes. She unfolded her napkin. August in Pendleton. Your father’s dapple-gray

mare in the north pasture, the one with the blaze. On our backs in grass and the

universe above us. That night started it.

Notes:

The 2010 census found that more than 80 percent of Americans, like me, live in

urban areas. Human beings have lit up the world with traffic lights and street

lights that never sleep at night. Some nights, even on nights without Oregon's

fogs, it is hard to see the Big Dipper because the night sky is filled with

reflections of urban light. As a plane descends into Portland I can track where I

am by the brightness of the freeways, the position of the parking lots around

malls. The alienation I feel at times from the night sky is similar to a divorce.

Something I knew well, something I trusted -- is gone. It's possible to buy into

eco-tours to travel to the darkest places on earth to experience what the night

sky looked like to human beings for thousands of years. Most of us have to work

to take children somewhere distant from where we live to see the Milky Way.

This is the feeling that prompted me to write this poem.

About the Author:

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who lives in Portland where

the night sky is often not as brilliant as she would like. Her

work leans often toward eco-poetry -- including her recent

collection, Ocean's Laughter, about a small town on Oregon's

north coast (Aldrich Press, 2016), which combines lyric poetry

with eco-poetry. Her chapbook Urban Wild (Finishing Line

Press, 2014) looks at how people interact with wildlife in

urban habitat.