Zodiac

It’s a long story:

how I wound up

stranded on some nameless island

in the middle of the Pacific

hundreds of miles away

from any other living human

and definitely no wifi.

Entertainment was pretty scant,

especially at night.

All I could do was lie on my back

on the rocky shoreline

and stare at the glowing universe

above me.

In Brooklyn, I never saw so many stars 

or the glowing fingers of the Milky Way

or darting meteors streaking

across the blackness

for just a second

before being extinguished like a candle.

I wasn’t good at identifying constellations

when I was young.

It’s definitely harder

when you can only see half the stars.

The diagonal belt of Orion

was the only one

that made a lasting impression.

So while I was stuck on this island,

I made up my own constellations,

giving birth to a new zodiac.

There was the leprous armadillo,

the oversized spoon,

the gullible mailman,

the lost backpack,

the reduced sodium spaghetti sauce,

the neighborly snake,

the seditious hipster,

the befuddled opossum,

the fair-trade diamond,

the deadly sandwich,

the morose goose.

It’s another long story:

but I was finally rescued

during the season

of the impractical designer handbag.

Back in Brooklyn,

my old friends in the sky

are now mostly invisible,

but lying in the park here with you,

I point out the very faint tip

of a diseased armadillo’s banded tail.