By: Paul Doty
Love licks the morning star, illuminates a life where you feel a voice. A rock and roll trope, a bell very early Sunday morning Chuck Berry corporeal in a dream dissolved duck walk sweating and talking over another coronavirus day, salt of the earth keep me tuned to her whisper’s grain. Life without expected navigation and lovers lying on their lawns looking to the night sky for some way to go on. The road up there, her punctuated truncated transcendent thought playing in my ears and Bright Morning Star in my head, love is a sextant from a forgotten civilization up to who knew what meteoric in their time.
Paul Doty is the Special Collections and Archives Librarian at St. Lawrence University. He resides in Canton New York with his wife Agnes in a house full of books, with a garage full of canoes. He has previously published in such publications as Nerve Cowboy, Shot Glass, Blueline, and Speckled Trout Review.
"The poem originates in the phrase that became the title, which came to me as I heard the folks song 'Bright Morning Star' playing in my head. The rest of the poem was a contemplation of a long time partnership, a subject I've been visiting and revisiting in my writing as my wife has been coping with a significant health issue."