Stars Fade || Spots Appear (contrapuntal)

[Read first down each column, then again row by row across columns.]
Stars Fade		Translated from the English Spots Appear
In grade school		I was young
the sky in my backyard		and the skin on the back of my hand
was filled with familiar stars,		was
memorized by heart		taken for granted.
Then, diurnal demands,		Many decades
a driving schedule,		gripping the steering wheel
allowed seeing at night only the waiting alarm clock		with hands at 10 & 2
in the caves of anxiety		in the sun of parenting and career.
Retired now,		Finally pausing
still insomniac,		at a rest stop in the evening,
I look through a narrow window at the night sky,		I am startled by
stars unrecognizable,		the back of my hand full of
constellations forgotten,		freckles, spots, blemishes,
random, disorienting, surreal,		foreign membrane,
awake on an unearthly planet		body-swapped to an alien husk.

John K. Kruschke

First published in Breakwater Review, Issue 39, 13 February 2026.

Notes: When reading a poetry journal that presented English translations beside originals in languages I don’t know, I realized that the translator could write anything, and I’d have no way of knowing whether it matched the source. I was also piqued by the heading that appeared above them: “Translated from the Chinese” (or whatever the language). So I imagined a genre of poems called “Translated from the English” in which the translation is a free-association based on the original, such that each enriches the other. I added one essential rule: the pieces must be contrapuntal, reading coherently and generating emergent meaning when scanned row by row across columns; otherwise they’d just be two parts of a single poem.

← Previous Poem

Poem List ↑

Next Poem →