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After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span

Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like

Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman

Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.

And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure

That someone was there squinting through the dust,

Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only

To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,

Even for a few nights, into that other life where you

And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?

Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my

Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?

Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep

Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,

Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired

And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen

That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life

In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky

Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands

Even if it burns.

Vocaroo recording:
http://vocaroo.com/i/s11wgZKr20Eu

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And not just them. Not just

The ramshackle family, the tíos,

Primitos, not just the bailaor

Whose heels have notched

And hammered time

So the hours flow in place

Like a tin river, marking

Only what once was.

Not just the voices of scraping

Against the river, nor the hands

Nudging them farther, fingers

Like blind birds, palms empty,

Echoing. Not just the women

With sober faces and flowers

In their hair, the ones who dance

As though they’re burying

Memory—one last time—

Beneath them.

And I hate to do it here.

To set myself heavily beside them.

Not now that they’ve proven

The body a myth, a parable

For what not even language

Moves quickly enough to name.

If I call it pain, and try to touch it

With my hands, my own life,

It lies still and the music thins,

A pulse felt for through garments.

If I lean into the desire it starts from—

If I lean unbuttoned into the blow

Of loss after loss, love tossed

Into the ecstatic void—

It carries me with it farther,

To chords that stretch and bend

Like light through colored glass.

But it races on, toward shadows

Where the world I know

And the world I fear

Threaten to meet.

http://vocaroo.com/i/s17jSa3e2MKi

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• Smith’s first collection, The Body’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2003), won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002.

• Her second book, Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007), won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.

• Her most recent collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

• Her other awards and honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University

• Essence Literary Award, a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation

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When some people talk about money

They speak as if it were a mysterious lover

Who went out to buy milk and never

Came back, and it makes me nostalgic

For the years I lived on coffee and bread,

Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday

Like a woman journeying for water

From a village without a well, then living

One or two nights like everyone else

On roast chicken and red wine.
Vocaroo recording:
http://vocaroo.com/i/s1lzSxbRyaAV

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• Tracy K. Smith was born on the 16th in 1972 in Massachusetts.

• She is an American poet and educator.

• From 1997 to 1999 she was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.

• In 2005 she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she is professor of creative writing.

• Nowadays, Smith is a judge for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.