Mary Brancaccio
Mary Brancaccio is a poet and teacher. Her poetry collection, Fierce Geometry, is just out from Get Fresh Books Publishing. Brancaccio's poetry has appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Minerva Rising, Edison Literary Review, Lake Affect Magazine and Adana, among others. Her poem, "Unfinished Work," was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is included in several anthologies of poetry, including Writing the Land: Maine, Writing the Land: Northeast, Farewell to Nuclear, Welcome to Renewable Energy (a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster) and Veils, Halos and Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women. Brancaccio has an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. She lives in South Orange, New Jersey. Her website is ghostgirlpoet.com.
Yuji’s Dream
Yuji Hyakutake, when you woke in the dark
to climb Kagoshima’s hills,
what drove you? I imagine
your sketchbook of constellations
your neck twisted between page
and telescope, marking the stars:
Libra, Hydra, the Crow.
Your search for a fresh sight.
When you first saw your comet
did you think, I must be dreaming?
So many years of waiting. So many
moves to find darker and darker skies.
Once, on a roadside outside Flagstaff
I stood with my lover in pitch dark
staring in wonder at its sky paint.
Nearby, invisible to us, cattle lowed
their loamy stench filling our nostrils
as a green and yellow tail splashed
across the clear night sky in Arizona.
His warm hand tightened on mine.
I’m not sure who I am anymore,
he whispered. Those who wander
in darkness, in cold, swamped
by second-guessing, plumb
starlit skies, as if what’s older
more magnificent than we are
might offer an answer.
Yuji, you died too soon.
But you lived to witness
Ulysses hitting your comet’s tail
detecting X-rays, new
molecules, distortions
of magnetic fields, measuring
a wake three hundred million miles --
the longest ever recorded --
three times the span between
Earth and our white-hot sun.
Last night I lay in autumn grass
watching dusk fall, watching stars --
some of them long dead -- rising
into focus against a darkening sky.
They are always there, aren’t they?
The stars, the comets, the supernovas.
Always. But often we’re too blind to see.
Yuji’s Quest
A comet returns to darkness --
it only shines in memory.
Mine was brighter than many.
I wandered the night
feeling my way with fingertips
as if blind, my feet halting, unsure
of earth’s solidity. Only in deep
murkiness did I grasp
the quality of light. I sensed
my path with ears nose toes.
I saw without illumination
knew truth even when cast
in heavy shadows. I sought
with heart not head.
I love this truth because
it was birthed within me, born
of yearning that sent me staring
into the sky, searching for a miracle
I could put my name to.
Once I was you, a seeker --
always restless, always chasing
illusions, and why not?
Hundreds of dreams
shoot across night’s sky.
The trick is to find them first.
I improved my odds, moved
further and further into Kagashima’s hills
deeper and deeper into the gloom.
When the first one appeared
I thought, This is it, this is the one.
But I learned how rare it is to find
a comet seen with the naked eye.
Most remain unnamed and
unremarkable. But a second one appeared.
I waited two rainy nights for proof.
I nearly went mad: doubt is a stone
in the throat -- impossible to swallow.
Time felt interminable, shame of error
loomed in my mind. How long and hard
my journey for validation. How rare the win.
What an idiot I’d been and now
now I would be exposed as
a fraud, chaser of fame, the great
master of all fools.
But I was right. Months later, photos
painted my comet against a California sky
high in piney mountains, or trailing
a desert in the dead of night
saluted only by cacti and other
lone watchers of the heavens.
Much later, space probes spewed
reams of data from my comet’s wake
new molecules from our sun’s birth
gasses and magnetic fields splayed out
in its long wake of light -- a dragon’s tail
long enough to wrap the sun and earth.
This, I thought, is my reward
for all I sacrifice. But after glory
where is the joy in living day-to-day?
And if I died too young, I only reflected
the truth revealed to me: not omen
of war or plague or conflagration
but the brevity of existence
as fragile as a leaf out of season
fading and falling, lost to a quick
north wind or a killing frost.
The comet left as quickly as it came.
Again, I was in the dark
finding my way, all of my senses
charged with an electric truth.
The Strange Satisfaction of Nothing to Say:
Dream of an Ornate Inscription Sewn to the Seat of My Pants
If I had eyes in the back of my head
I could glean my mother’s wisdom off my jeans
but I was driving by the seat of my pants
and anyway, I forgot to read her words
and left them behind, thought at the time
I thought, what a nice inscription they would make
carved into a plaque above my sink, or
sewn into a pillow for a couch in a room
I never visit. Such is the problem with dreams:
the signifiers are all there, but I fail
to comprehend them. Instead, I spin my psyche’s
backroads, driving too fast on the wrong side
headed in the opposite direction, worrying about
what I forget to put to rest. There is no closure
no final words over an open grave, no last
reconciliation. Only the sweat beads from
the Mad Hatter’s brow: I am late late late
for a very important date. I remember
none of it. Not the day or place or action
I agreed to. None of it. Pity my poor memory.
Instead I’m distracted by heavy morning fog
and the unlikely appearance of an old friend
willing to go along for the ride. Hop on, dear one.
There is a clock to keep and it’s ticking down.
I am lost and ignorant, but at least I know where I am going.