HEAVENLY BODIES

Everybody, seemingly, reached out
For a door knob, one significant button, the sky;
And everyone, I think, had their doubts.
As for me, at times I visited where
Puzzled, dizzy, grinning, apparently in mid-air,
Reaching for his whiskey, wishing to fly,

Noel laughed on his balcony.
Teased, let's say, by heaven's stark
Naked and hypothetically sexy body,
Which, move as me might, he couldn't touch
Any more than my cigarette's smoke that looped up, vanished,
He asked me once, "Am I whistling in the dark?"

Everyone, back then, wanted out of this world
And made phone calls, or love, or flicked their lighters,
Etc.  Noel had in mind a girl
Who lived crosstown or further even
Than that pinned-up Miss December heaven.
He tied red string around unsent letters.

"It's," I told him, "catch as catch can."
Satellites, shooting stars, and UFOs,
Like the ritziest diamonds, or anyway, zircon,
Decked high heaven coldly out.  The shine beguiled
Noel, glassy-eyed, who stared like a poor man's child.
"Everybody, someday, goes,

And mystically," he blurted, "finds someone."
Two stories down, pedestrians moved apart
As Noel giggled, "We are not alone."
Out in the cold, only my cigarette lit,
I hunched on the balcony, kept quiet.
Later, he named the sky Miss Lonely Hearts.


Jack Hayes
© 2010This poem originally appeared in Timbuktu