Gary Fincke: Naming the Sky

“There’s my sky,” my father says. I don’t know

what he expects, answer, in his driveway,

“It’s clear, all right,” and idling in neutral,

Think he’s planning to tell me the ancient

Names for the dots or the tales they fathered,

People who suffered, changed, and ascended

While somebody handed their stories down.

Two dippers and Orion—I forget

The rest or never learned or failed to see

Anything but the stars scattered on our scale

Of pulse and breath. I want him to show me

Archer, bear, lion; I want marble busts

Of myth to form above us like pillars

Of flame, chariots of fire, accounting

For every light, and because my mother

Has died, wonder if he means to show me

Where she is, how one cluster has reformed

To suggest a melodrama of hope.

Heavy-headed with travel, I wait while

The time-released light, set to eleven,

Blinks off in his living room like stars near

The horizon tumbling off the sky’s screen.

And I remember no clock in this house

Is correct, all six set so fast no one

Would believe them, early as wet robins

In today’s false thaw of February.

We stand with the night in our lungs; we breathe

A sentence of silence until he says,

“Venus and Jupiter,” directs me low

In the sky where I see so many lights

I can nod, certain they are among them.

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Note from the author: Naming the Sky was the one poem of mine that my father memorized—all 31 lines—he would recite it for me when i visited and eventually my sister had it calligraphied as a poster that he hung on his living room wall—he lived 21 years past my mother’s death, and now my sister has it on one of her walls.

Copyright 2023 Gary Fincke. First published in Poetry Northwest. Republished in The Double Negatives of the Living (Zoland Books).

Gary Fincke is a poet and author of short stories and nonfiction. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Fincke is the recipient of multiple awards for his poetry, including the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and the Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore.