When Esther Mack ignited her first star
from exhausted aprons, she slept
with the weight of that star on her right foot,
just where she could kick it into space.

A pair of purer, one-color shinings
floated where her husband breathed.
The rest of the quilt she spangled with squares
to clash and keep the three big suns awake.

Always, at some hour, the tired star would say to her,
boost me up into the darkness--
among hearthfuls of heatless fires, beside
no single sharp dazzle of rays, but in the company

of small lights of old sheets and muumuus.
--And to prove the heavenly likeness, a lining
that is entirely curtains, exactly the way
the universe is heavy-draped.

She tacked the sixteen-patch blocks but quilted
the biggest lights straight through to the back.
As if to keep them there, to sink them
in the years it took to suspend

this cloth over her complete--
last knot, nothing bought
but thread--its volatile colors lifting off
to stay restless above her head