Light fills and empties hollows every day. Dawn, dusk. Unstinting generosity. But when the black is permanent, the night? Oh death, be kinder than the goodbye thought.
Bright dark rhyming looks: goodbye, hello. Two transfixed regards that ask and know and overflow. A wordless history, a shadow palimpsest of all we saw.
Lesbia’s sparrow hopping down a lane toward black, modo huc, modo illuc – pause and go? Nox est perpetua. It only seemed the path came to a stop. Then it wound on.
Cinders. Snow. Old craters. Black and white, hot and cold. Scrubbed clean by desert air, a citadel, high, red with afternoon, abandoned now, but people once lived there.
Next morning bathed in light, god’s paint box open: rose-colored boulders strewn as on the moon keep their balance only for so long, shadows shifting over each warm rock.
Colors to touch, textures at which to gaze: your fingertips have eyes, your eyes are fingers. Here is my right hand. Here is my left. Here is what I have seen, remembered, known.
Luminous long looks that seek and give. Dark of the moon so stars shine in the window. On the last day of the dying year it was time to go away from there,
the scintillation of desert air, the chiseled clarity of Joshua Tree and get to where we watched a red sun sink into the sea.