The Astronaut’s Lover
by Audrey Elledge
What if your lover left you for the moon?
Audrey wrote this poem for our website launch over three years ago. We like it so much we figured it deserved a Substack debut.
The Astronaut’s Lover You dreamt of rising. My allegiance was to gravity. And yet I would’ve painted brave on my face and joined if you asked. (You didn’t ask.) Still, I loved you enough to let you go, to watch you melt into dark ink while my feet sank further in this sloping earth. Up and up and out, you took those searching hands those climbing eyes that lust for stars that marker-dot freckle, you know the one. Did the countdown sound like a song? Did you glance over your shoulder? Did you forget earth was bigger than the moon? The crashing news, the word of the end came like bird-cry at dawn— startling and expected. I knew even before you left that Love takes what belongs to it. And so she won this tug of war, that moon. I want to despise her, but she is still what she’s always been, what we all are: jealous and giving; glittering and trembling. A stranger once told me he could never grow close because I reminded him too much of someone he lost. Well, that’s great for you, I thought. Try avoiding the moon. At first, I boarded my windows at night, pulled tight my curtains against the waxing and waning crescents, the tally marks of my ongoing loss, this terrible and gleaming weight. But the earth has kept me so tenderly. While you stay on the moon, I have stayed in the fields, in chipped coffee mugs in swallow songs in juice running down my wrist in lead on my hand in laughter out of familiar mouths in flowers lingering like music in jars in the grace of gravity in white-tipped waves and the stone that cuts me at the bottom of the sea. And finally, one night in the undraping dusk, I look to her pale full face and don’t think of you, only wonder at the silent gifts of this world, and at how even darkness can again be bright.
xoxo
—UiLY