Bortle Dark

-The Bortle Dark Sky Scale is used to measure the brightness of the sky, and the effects of  light pollution on our ability to see the stars.

Beyond the airplane’s hermetically sealed windows,
Tulsa lay—an electric body: all context, no detail.

Lights line the streets of Tulsa, map it on a grid.
They seem superimposed, arbitrary— 

they seem a shame,
a monstrous order imposed
upon landscape. Not orchestration, circuitry,
circulation. 

I think of platelets pumping their way
through some unlit heart of America.
But that sounds wicked, and it ain’t.

It's Oklahoma, whose name makes me long for lightning.
Oklahoma, which lives in my mind in grainy black and white,
like grocery store bread lightly toasted on a plate at breakfast,
like miles of okay. This is not an insult.  

The cabin lights, though dimmed,
block every star save one—the portside leans
and it too disappears.

I could find Polaris in my sleep but it hides.
I know Venus is behind me where I cannot see.
I suddenly don’t, and suddenly want, to know
if a river runs through Tulsa like a division. If it's
chock of catfish and rasped hands to pull them
from darkness into light. Mud-fleshed plenty.

I remember the train trestles crossing my Ohio.
Stories of monsters in the deep dark worn by floods
and pressures, growing large enough to be a threat.
Fish story. Something to warn us away,
from the mud, shale, coal, grit, poison waters that
sometimes look almost beautiful.

I know the barges on the Ohio move in near silence—
the soft red/green lit the droplets of rain on my every childhood window.
Starboard green. Portside glowing red. The Ohio whittles and rises. 

Were there a river below me now, the strong starboard of the plane
would illuminate nothing. Not a hint of green
would stutter along the water's edge. Yet, I imagine
I see it. There, a dark band meanders past
houses lit like five and dimes, buildings
throwing up a domed glow that dims heaven's detail. 

I want to weep for those who search
for what stars streetlamps do not kill with insistence.  

At home in South Carolina I draw the curtains at night.
I dim those lights I am able to. Navigate by anticipation
and memory, echolocate: door, step, tree, tree.

I stand in the yard staring at the sky like a Baptist. There Aries.
There Orion. There Taurus. There 

is so much is missing. The milky way indistinct.
The Seven Sisters, so faint even in the South Carolina dark
that had I not memorized their pattern
of movement I might lose them.

The plane moves past the city, flying over
the vast dark land I love most—
I imagine the world upside down. Build
roadmaps between the constellations emerging
from Tulsa's orange haze, and think of driving. 

I fly, but I desire, I understand,
more clearly, the road, which is and is not
the sweet opposite of flight:
all detail, no context,

blacktop cracking in cold,
sweet asphalt softening under sun,
the sound of wheels and engine hum. 

Below me in Tulsa the mother road began,
stretched her arms like the promise of speed.
Now fallen into neglect. The tourist
traps close down. Dust gathers.

The airplane is dust free. Has that new
car smell: plasticky, cold.  No plains
wind, no distant rains. The
clouds close. The cabin vibrates
for a second. The woman
beside me sleeps silently.

The sky in Southern Ohio was so dark
when I was a child that the stars seemed
like sound. The diffuse light
of Parkersburg, and Portsmouth, and Athens,
and Huntington could not hide them.
To the north, Columbus
threw up its halo of promise
to every one of us, a permanent sunrise.

There is a map of the last few dark skies,
charting Bortle Dark Sky Scale.
The east coast glows. Europe is a nebula.
But here in the flyover...

Driving once along 25 from the Q to ToC, the dark
took my breath away. In Nebraska,
in Wyoming, in the parts of Nevada
that don't shine like a strobe, the
dark itself breathes. My lungs ache for
North Dakota to fill me with stars.

My plane will land in Oakland,
city of there is no there. The artificial stars
of the airport runway guide the pilots down.
Rigel throbs red over the ocean I want to
run towards. And the woman beside me wakes. 

She gathers her things impatiently
when the cabin lights rise and turn us
into wide-eyed and blinking ghosts.

Later as I exit the ramp, the airport, and cross the lot,
my hands will shake. Stilling only when I crank
the engine of my rental car and point it
towards the darkest part of the sky away from every
blinding bay light.  Windows down
I will whoop into the night. Windows down

I will drive until my will falters, which will coincide
with the rising sun. That single star obliterating
all others.  And  maybe at sunset I will find
some place distant to stretch
my back against the sun and engine
warmed hood, patient
for what will come with the rising stars.

Amanda Rachelle Warren's work has appeared in Borderlands, The Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, Anderbo, and the Beloit Poetry Journal as well as other journals. Her chapbook Ritual no.3: For the Exorcism of Ghosts, was published by Stepping Stone Press in 2011. She is the 2017 recipient of the Nickens Poetry Fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She currently teaches at the University of South Carolina Aiken with her husband and fellow poet, Roy Seeger. She is looking for a home for her full-length manuscript