When I’m at the tail of a tiresome day

and the sun has long set, light being returned again

like a small mercy before two days of flood,

I listen to songs of my childhood over a balcony

of bearable cold. I don’t mind my body

in the undercurrents of winter now and then.

I see Venus in the sky, recognizing the planet

by words I read in childhood in a book of astrology

you can see the planet over a clear sky

like a many pointed star, glimmering almost,

showing me the stars in my eyes. Born on the 24 th ,

Venus is my planet . Tell me how we age but childhood

stays intact in the sky of life — how continents shrink

into baubles of memory, how it emerges like scent.

God, if I must write elegies, memorize a lost sea,

I’ll take beauty where you give me beauty.

A reference in this poem is made to Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs.