THE STARS FROM THE TENNIS COURTS
by Gregory Loselle
We’re told the constellations will arrange,
across the ages, into different shapes—
the dipper will become a bowl, the pole
will shift, Pleiades drift apart like guests
who rise and leave the table one by one,
their voices trialing off into the night,
and Cassiopeia, will rise from her couch
to stretch her new-found arms above her head
and shake her hair out in the spangled dark
before she lifts a foot and launches up
in flight above the Ursines—crows perhaps by now,
or lambs. Distinctions blur between
them, figures overlap, incorporate
or merge: a fin becomes a wing, a tongue
a leg or tail prehensile; two heads join
and share an eye before they drift apart,
two faces now in profile. They adapt—
siderial evolution in the time
lapse of the history of night. By then
another watcher will stretch out alone
where I am on the macadam, lie down
beneath the Perseids and stare into
the slow drift of the stars transforming us.
Gregory Loselle has won four Hopwood Awards at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has won The Academy of American Poets Prize, the William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting. He was the winner of the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, The Robert Frost Award of The Robert Frost Foundation, and the Rita Dove Prize for poetry (where he won both First Prize and an Honorable Mention) at Salem College. He has won multiple awards in the Poetry Society of Michigan’s Annual Awards Competition. His first chapbook, Phantom Limb, was published in 2008, and another, Our Parents Dancing, in 2010, both from Pudding House Press. Two more, The Whole of Him Collected, and About the House, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. His short fiction has been featured in the Wordstock and Robert Olen Butler Competition anthologies, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post, and The Metro Times of Detroit, and his poetry has appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Georgetown Review, River Styx, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Poetry Nook, Sow’s Ear, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others.