Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand's Kapiti Coast. She turned to poems after a lifetime as a science editor.

Mary Cresswell

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Light Years

after Emily Dickinson

The stars that I am seeing
are never in the now –
they split to minnow fragments
off memory's black below.

Feeding at the surface
they might come back again
to flick quicksilver to the top
on set or random line.

They might swell
to join the daylight
in shapes that I can see

or cruise dark and fatly
through the canyons
of my mind's bathymetry.