night light

The moon lingers, bloated in the footlights, while the tattered clouds scatter like a half-hearted smattering of applause. There is a glow atop the swaying trees, a light that spills and spreads, blazing like any gift from heaven. That other-world flood of brightness, the dead-pan moon shedding that arctic light over the rickety wheel work of a reticent spring. That spill, that shine, that promise that somehow something longed for will abide.

The whole sky at night is a debacle, a bled out corpse-faced moon glowering away while it does its best to obscure any relevant stars. The abrupt dismissal of constellations for being at the back of some blunt satellite. So much for our astrologic precognitions, so much for the fate the grinding cosmos has in store-- the topped-off mantra of moonlight all that is left when looking up is all that is left. What breath, what prayers can we spend on such monuments to passing gravity?

The day dreams away these lonesome hours. The day has its laws and its reasons, and it will not be trifled with while there is work to be done. It is full of lies and distance, and keeps its own counsel while the night whittles away at the wheel of the moon. From Artemis's pallid flesh to Apollo's gaudy chariot there are huddled hours of mysterious works and secret appetites. The world sleeps and the night is squandered, a hunter's moon, a goddess calling. A night that shines for reasons both obvious and always just out of reach.