He not only takes, he gives.

My father once said to me as his only daughter that there were things in the world without limit and to try to limit the limitless would only lead to frustration and misunderstanding and with the world, with innocence, with that that we could not touch for some reason, the reasoning beyond us and on into the Milky Way.

To look at life through a telescope, all stars, comets, gas and time, the time that has passed and the patience of time with my father as my only father, grew out of age and the things in the world I discovered then happenstance looked back to see through his eyes and advice: like people, like knowledge, like responsibility, like love and money. And like the art of being human.

Dad raised me from the time I was two until I left for college and on into a wild yonder or night sky, no clouds or oceans, but dirty blue, sad streets renewed of the city that I was raised in with street lights like suns. He never stopped raising me, a flag to the flagpole, a scarecrow, a barn or building or ship or anything in the world built. Like religion, like belief.

I went to the observatory one night with this boy and young man named Bobby during my internship from the state university I’d graduated with the degree in physics and somehow I was to apply this, somehow to know the difference between the stars in a man’s eyes and stars as tangible, real stars; physics as a law and then Bobby’s fleece pullover.

He was moving to California and I was going to travel. But his physics were demanding. His body was sculpted from not myth or legend or even work or labor. It had not been sculpted by God’s own hand or creation. It had been sculpted by belief, real human belief and my belief, the belief that I loved him.

I recited Frost the day I met Bobby. I recited a love poem of his in my head. Though Bobby wanted to be a star someday like an actor even from the days when he was so little that acting was really just lying-to his parents, to his teachers and Bobby taught me so much that night and I wished it had been about himself.

But it wasn’t. It was about me. The night belonged to me and he’d given it without taking and had told me as much. We looked through the metered and sprocket wheeled but so slick telescope seeing into the past and on into a white, yellow moon.

“Is that Mars?” he asked. The trigger for the opened window at the end of the scope released effortlessly with the flip of a switch and now the cosmos lay before us like a blanket of time, of beginnings, of endings.

It was not Mars and I told him as much.

“It’s a red nymph,” I said, Bobby’s hand reaching for my back, petting it, coaxing out of me a whimper meant to be a roar.

Bobby knew triggers.

My father was not there to hear it. My father, who taught me astronomy, did not know what a red nymph looked like because he‘d never gotten past the universe, far enough digging into the chest of creation to know it other than in books, encyclopedias, in hobby.

I drew Bobby’s hand from off my back and said, “You are closer to those stars than you imagine. You are closer to them than you are me.”

He didn’t understand the statement. We kissed. A comet fell. The earth spun at intervals, its lapses and pauses and orbits and coughs. And then Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…and sorry I could not travel both…

Two roads diverged after a yellow moon. That boy became a man. The man showered with comets, the cosmos and such, with stars. You can see him if you look hard enough, outside the city, any city, his body sculpted there: delicate, wavering, sly and on the brink of the northern hemisphere and sanity.