In the beginning: oppositional Mars was not more than a pink speck, slightly larger than the rest, in the East above my neighbor’s house.
Somewhere down a long, familiar road an old love appeared new in the odd Winter's half-light. Falling in love with the shape of a tree in February has as much to do with skyline, the distance beyond, a cut of light, & sky so pink it might be flesh, as it does with the way the skinny bones reach out to embrace their own emptiness, want of nest, bloom, leaf, or errant kite.
But here, in this hurtling car, my sounds are less than nothing: beat, breath, synaptic fire: silenced by the friction of rubber & road, glass & wind.
(Suddenly, I recall the almost visible ribbon of geese I heard in last night’s darkness, still calling, now more necessary, perhaps, as their bodies blend into the midnight, blue-black vacancy. Is it wind they follow, or are they pushed by a force they do not know, a stream, though invisible, that they are more comfortable swimming in? They were gone as quickly as they arrived. Silence persists.)
Here, now, Mars, moon & Venus all down, or at least invisible, the meditation ends as one last streetlamp extinguishes, the trail of its light a chromatic halo, ephemeral, like a last note of birdsong or the final syllable of a hummed matin.
And I am alone again with all my doubts, all my loves, intact.
