**On We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning by Lee Potts**

by Tyler Truman Julian

Lee Potts’ newest chapbook, We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning, embodies a quiet power. The poems grapple with universal questions of life, death and change, juxtaposing the natural world and human nature. These are not quaint pastorals. These are poems of rural spaces where one is “living too far away / from town to hear the church / bells announce a new hour, / a wedding, a fire,” and, in these spaces, the relationship between nature and humanity is fraught (“Listen”). The reality of death is evident in the changing seasons, a fading garden space and the wilding of cultivated spaces; yet, they consistently present their humanness through questions such as What comes next? and How do we go on?
            At the edge of urban spaces, Potts paints a picture of an individual wrestling with loss, attempting to understand his place in the natural passing of time. This is evident in the chapbook’s opening poem, “It may not have been rain at all”:
            The rain becomes rivers, the skies always clear.
            We’ll see constellations cross the ancient stage

            for our tiny applause tonight. They always hit
           their marks. I’m a man. I’m allowed to forget
            about my own body. To even forget that it’s bound
            to dissolve like some soft gritty pill under

God’s own tongue.

Potts shows impressive command of each line through careful enjambment, layering meaning from line to line. The speaker establishes and relishes in natural beauty, but that beauty also reflects the speaker’s fleeting existence on this planet and his mental state. The linework and use of nature as symbol found in “It may not have been rain at all” continues throughout the chapbook. In “Every green thing’s name,” the symbolism of nature is more apparent as the poem takes on a narrative mode:

            Winter turned the kitchen
           into a tabernacle closed around
            those dark hours, keeping
            them hidden and apart.
            Death soaked in like grey rain,
            rust off the shed’s steel roof.
            You saw that one final
            spring and just a bit of summer.
            The weeds set in fast.
            A garden never stays
            a garden.

The narrative mode of the poems in We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning allows Potts (through his speaker) to explore specific and individual moments of loss, while the natural and religious imagery of the chapbook adds powerful universal weight to the themes of death and grief he explores. The chapbook’s title poem, “We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning,” embraces this universal call to quiet reflection. The speaker is flying home, late at night, and reflects on what he can see out his window:

            Every light down there
            is where it is because someone
            felt a stab of desire.
            How do any of us navigate
            to what’s always hidden behind
            the infinitely tender horizon?
            Our course set by constellations
            of our own want. We trace
            white lines like thread taunt
            between some of the most distant
            stars and devise creatures
            we alone can see or name.
            Always and forever on the same journey
            that first hauled us to our feet, before
            we even had all the words
            for what we were after.

This universal call to reflection—How do any of us face whatever comes next after loss?—cements the chapbook’s stakes in poignantly human concerns, concerns that anyone could face at one time or another.

We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning is a moving chapbook that everyone can find themselves in, even as it follows its own personal threads through grief and change. There is power in naming hurt and Potts does not shy away from this act. Instead, he gives names—and therefore meaning—to that which might feel nebulous through his sharp use of symbol and shrewd linework. The poems of We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning are both universal and deeply personal and, in this way, exemplify what great poetry is meant to do.

In case you missed it—here are Potts’ poem from The Shore:
After Hours
A pedagogy for the rain