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Constellations
By Meredith Wise

The father held his child against him,
Turning away the ice-fall of the wind:
They were far out under the boughs of night…

"Look," he whispered.
His heart beat twice as she lifted her eyes.

"There is Orion the hunter,
Rising over the trees with the
Pleiades before his face;
There the lion,
The scales of justice…
And, with the star on her forehead,
The Virgin."

The moon stroked a blue sheen over her eyes;
Dark water welled behind them.
"I don't see anything," was her answer.

He tried to guide her eyes
To the same slender brightness
He saw, to right the skewed parallax,
Sad and inevitable as fate,
Penumbra of starlight a fine splinter between them.

Telling the stars with reverent fingers, she,
In later years, remembered
Her father's words:
"These are the lights that will guide you.
The ship will be yours, and you will go to the sea
As all our people did. Believe me, believe me,
It claims you - the sundering horizon,
The white gull that clips the dark wave,
The fog swathed in at evening,
And the listing tide that tilts back, back…
To the sea.
But there is no path on the water.
Your road is laid out above you."

And his dark star-divining arm
Leaning out over those high seas
Like the questing spar of a mythic ship.
He was commending her to the highest harbor,
Where she might one day see
The shining conclave of the Summer Triangle
Beckoning, from across the water.