Andrew Johnston
Lucy
Her collapsed heart,
ripened to diamonds,
rang and flashed like a gong
in Centaurus —
*
the man-horse, or woman-horse,
on a cliff above the sea
who lifts her head to gaze at us
through the Whole Earth
*
Telescope - distant
crystal music
on her mind, years
becoming light years
*
in her eye.
Andrew Johnston’s latest book is Birds of Europe (Victoria University Press, 2000). He lives in Paris, where he works as an editor for the International Herald Tribune. He also edits The Page ‹thepage.name›. Of ‘Lucy’, Johnston writes: “Shortly after the New Zealand writer Janet Frame died, I read a news story about a star that astronomers had discovered that they believed to be completely composed of diamonds. They called the star Lucy.”