Poem: Constellations

How can I misplace the meaning of
the existence of other lives,
    other’s doubts and starlit regrets
    other’s triumphant moonlit wisps of cloud
    other’s brisk, dark lusts and howling urges
    other’s daybreak nocturnal loves
with my personal sunlit world
    in its shiniest season?

My world is of my solitary perception.
My father does not conduct my eyes
nor does my mother whisper the sounds I hear daily
into the ears my brother pries open.
My friends do not scrape my palms
across the surfaces I feel
nor do they firmly grasp the door handle
and instruct me on its cool firmness
before opening.
My lover does not deliver the vaporous tendrils
of perfume and stink
to the depths of my nostrils
nor does she place them past my lips and onto the tip of my tongue.
No:
Perception is a lonely affair.
My body absorbs the physical to create my idea of it
and I can only live in, and barely imagine,
a world bound by those ideas.
I could conclude that I make the world,
    even that I own it.

But I do not make my world alone.
I own not its deed
    I rule not its politics.
My night sky, like smoke,
    belongs to no one.

When my eyes show me an orange
I see not a plump citric encased in its soft shell
but only its gently grooved sunset skin.
My ears announce a prickly hissing
but do not grasp the spatula that cusps the half-seared salmon
an inch above the skillet
and flips it to its backside.
My skin sizzles after brushing against a stovetop cast iron pot
but does not leap to retrieve the ice,
shepherd it into a newspaper bag
and hold it to the reddening, wrinkling spot.
My nose delivers the toasty scent of cinnamon
but does not realize the time has come
to extract the cookies from the oven’s mouth.
When my tongue brings me fresh tomatoes
    acid and sunlight sweet
I taste not the method with which they were prepared.

I do not make my world alone.
Rather
I assemble it as the night assembles stars,
as the year assembles days.
My kitchen is not one unseen by mortal eyes before.
It houses the same tools
    spatulas, tablespoons,
recipes books, cutting boards,
a palm-sized dish in the shape of a cat drowned in salt
as my neighbors’.
My night is dark like all nights.
My stars shy away from glowing cities like all stars.
Even the way in which I greet the night
    with loose-fitting clothes and toothpaste,
    perhaps a shower
is far from unique.
Even the way in which I greet my cutting board
    with soaped and toweled hands
    bearing ingredients
is far from unique.

My mother educated me on the majestic friendship of the onion,
the assurance of the measuring cup,
the slender balance of the sharp knife,
and my father instructed me to steam my first
undersalted vegetables.
My brother left me his star chart
    and I studied its constellations before sleep
    each night while it hung over me
    glued to the ceiling.
My friends and I gazed upon the Perseid Meteor Shower
    from Crater Lake,
    what felt like North America’s eardrum,
    lying with my back on a blanket,
    staring above the forest fire haze.
My lover stole me to farmer’s markets
    and found the deepest, juiciest oranges
    dropped them in our canvass totes
    with muscular black kale
    and the bulbous eggplant we planned to devour that evening.
We jump on each other like stanzas
we link arms like words
we breed doubt like commas
we quickly die after short lives like periods
but not until after we have shaped worlds together!
Solar systems, galaxies
gravitating in and out
towards and apart
constellations that change shape
    from Orion to the Little Dipper
with bouts of cosmic inspiration.