this pollution in my blood is familiar 

During that cold secluded winter
when knee deep snow erased the world
I fed wood to the iron belly stove,
burned kerosene and chunks or rejected coal
to keep warm. Weeks of not stepping off the porch, along with
the glorious absence of clocks and calendars
froze over the hours and days in one long polar dream.
My beard grew long
and I was king of the world under erasure.

I saw my last pure sky of stars in the first weeks
of the great melting. The snow stopped, and the night sky
bounced shards of blindness off the ice
like some cosmic rebirth no one was expecting.
Struggling to remember the names of constellations, I discovered
that mine is an autumn memory; so I looked for Orion.
During sleepless nights, I stood on the hill
drawing my own patterns in the sky
and gave them names I would remember. They were shapes of you:
the outlines of your eyes,
the shape of your nose,
your mouth in the refracted light of dead stars
light years away.

As a boy,
I learned the constellations from books:
surrounded by green walls, a tiled ceiling covered with
brown spots from rusty water pipes. There was a layer of dust
on everything except the librarian’s desk. It was spotless,
like every crease of her Baptist wife’s dress and the lines
dug deep in her face. Pencils stuck in the ceiling
made their own nameless constellations.

This pollution in my blood is familiar:
smoke stack residue of the homeland
where the stars watch over us
no more.