Between the Skies
by Adam Michael Finney
He hands me the telescope. Says, Look.
And I see a speckled smudge suspended
there like an ultrasound. That spring I
was eighteen and holding a cold can
staring at the Pleiades, I saw no endings
for nebulae, the close-clustered promises
of the young, the yet-to-be turning into what
one turns. Then my friend with the telescope
got sick. Then he was gone—
As dusk falls above the house where we sought
the stars, I go to the overlook: silhouettes
of bone-like snags stirring chaparral,
and, everywhere, dense brush creeping in thick
as Southern vines. But oaks grow slow in clay
and stone. I write, Once there was a giant tree . . .
and chewing on a blade of yerba santa, I can
almost see the skyward branches. Eighteen,
a far-off glow, what vastness had I known?
Adam Michael Finney, a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA program, is living and teaching in the California foothills near Yosemite. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Addiction, Allium, and Hole in the Head Review, and his criticism has appeared in Cleaver.
