Seven Sisters Six Stars

We drove all the way up to Franconia Notch
looking for a place where I could stop to see
a patch of totally unlight-polluted night sky.

It was fall and as we approached and then came
through the Notch the New England fall colors
and the early sunset combined to produce a peak

Of color and light spread out over the rippling range
of those Green Mountains so that the sun set sinking
on those mountains and the leaves in their mosaic

Blasted our eyes into an earthly vision of heaven
and as we rode in our charging automotive chariot
across the heights of this brilliant living paradise

In the dusk still looking back to that heaven in sky
we finally turned and headed back to our urban home
hoping to catch a glimpse of the spinning cosmos

In the upended clusters of the mighty Milky Way
but instead found ourselves cut off from our vision
by the highway treeline and clouds from the south.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.