I search for him overhead – brilliant, unreachable –
taste his fire on my hair, his jazz in my flesh.
The infinity-strip of our story wraps the zenith
like an astronomer’s tape, hung on memory’s neck.

It measures all we have lost, swells with spring,
diminishes with snow. My sun binds everything, even
death. He cambered past the cusp when we parted,
traced a figure-eight to aphelion and back.

Once he glowed above me but now he shifts south,
slow but certain through this winter afternoon.
Past twelve o’clock already: his track lurches to dark
lands where lovers drowse; where widows dream

of solstice, warm in their longer light, unseeing
as the sky changes around them. If I rest too,
will he raise me from this frozen ground, lift my eyes
to the hills, blush my tilted face? Is he Apollo

now? No – just some sad wanderer whose ruts
cross themselves at midpoint, knot their bright noose:
the lemniscate, that keeps us both from heaven,
seals its forever loop – our burning tether.

It’s a somewhat obscure extended metaphor, but an absolutely gorgeous one, circling from the premise image to the relationship and back with elegant precision. I did not know the term, Analemma, before I read this stunning poem. I will not forget it now. --Sara Clancy