Read Your Eyes in Stars for Free Online

remembered beauty in the night,
    Against black silences I waked to see
    A shower of sunlight over Italy
    And green Ravello dreaming on her height;
    I have remembered music in the dark,
    The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach’s,
    And running water singing on the rocks
    When once in English woods I heard a lark.
    “But all remembered beauty is no more
    Than a vague prelude to the thought of you—
    You are the rarest soul I ever knew,
    Lover of beauty, knightliest and best;
    My thoughts seek you as waves that seek the shore,
    And when I think of you, I am at rest.
    “That’s how I want to feel someday about someone,” Elisa said.
    “I like poetry better when someone reads it,” I said.
    “Don’t you want to feel that way about someone someday?”
    “I have to think about that.”
    “What is there to think about?”
    “Nothing. Everything. I’m just getting used to talking about ideas that usually stay in my head. Sometimes I don’t even know they’re there. Then something makes me see them.”
    “Sara Teasdale killed herself,” Elisa said.
    “She did not.”
    “She did too.”
    “Daddy told me if anyone thinking about suicide could shut his eyes and see how he would turn out if he stayed alive, no one would ever do it.”
    “Oh, I believe that too. And I believe a lot of people have suicidal thoughts,” Elisa said. “Why do you blush?”
    “I’ve thought of doing it. Sort of.” I was expecting a reaction, a cry of No!, wide eyes, at least a raised eyebrow.
    “Sort of? I’ve thought of jumping! Every time we went somewhere high, like the Eiffel Tower. You know, in Paris? I’d look down and say to myself, ‘Jump, Elisa!’”
    “I know the Eiffel Tower is in Paris. I might not go places, but I know about them!”
    “Jumping, drowning, shooting yourself if you can find a gun,” said Elisa. “I think anyone in her right mind thinks about doing it at some point. I believe we all have inside lives as well as outside ones. Sometimes the inside life takes over.”
    “Is that what happened to Sara Teasdale?”
    “Maybe. Or maybe she believed something about her life was worse than it really was.”
    “She probably had dark thoughts,” I said.
    “I used to have dark thoughts,” she said.
    “About what?”
    “About never belonging anywhere, missing Germany, never having a real home.”
    “You had a life instead.”
    “I didn’t have friends until you. I never even petted a cat the way I pet your Mugshot. I still hardly ever see my father, and he is the most important person in my life…. What are your dark thoughts about?”
    “I miss Elmira, New York.”
    “What do you miss about it?”
    “Myself. I was myself there. When we moved here, wefound out all the prison kids went to Cayuta High West. I think they didn’t want us at East.”
    “I don’t have such dark thoughts since I met you,” said Elisa.
    “Me neither since you waltzed across the street.”

11
    A GOOD MANY Cayutians had summer homes on the lake. They lived there from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Some places were shacks, unheated, with outdoor plumbing, and others were grander. Our family could never move there summers because my father had to be in his home at the bottom of Retribution Hill, on call if anything went wrong at the prison.
    We could look up and see the prison and hear it. There were shouts from the yard where men recreated. There was always a band rehearsal and the sound of individual band members practicing the drums or the saxophone—whatever instruments they played. Those times prisoners cut our lawn or put on the storm windows, I wasn’t allowed to talk to them or even appear when they were there.
    This warm day in the middle of June, Elisa and I were at my house, making egg-and-olive sandwiches for a picnic. Elisa had brought the bread and olives across the streetwhile I hard-boiled the eggs. I had made a batch of chocolate nut fudge, a treat Elisa liked.
    Many of our classmates had moved to