"
Mountains did look in
the windows of the thin aluminum room
over loud tar paper roofs
We could see how
peaks
covered with lime or snow
backed away
a little wounded
from their literal distance
" – Mary Kinzie

I wondered, tonight, as the full moon flooded my room as it flooded the landscape around me, as it flooded the night from one limb of the horizon to the other, how it is that words describe the darkness so easily, while the light can be elusive as a star in the evening fog?

At least for myself, when the waves of a loss or a lack wash against me as against the shore of me, and one after another the grains of sand that comprise my sturdy self are swept back into the all-engendering ocean, it seems as though action describes the light, while thought picks up the edge of night, draws the arc of a meteor as it burns as it descends, the flash of the photographer's camera before what was once is revealed to the lens.

There it is: the perfect, empty forever, one single step away from the artificial daylight I call a kitchen, one threshold away into the yard, where the absence of the sun's burning bright is visible in my inability to see the outline of anything; or perhaps I can perfectly trace nothing, as nothing is all that I cannot see. Did it mean the world had disappeared? A child would say Yes and shake in fear. A teen wouldn't consider, being in the throes of creation. An adult at the middle of his road would say I Believe and the blank canvas, instead of being Void, would be pregnant with the imagined All and therefore, strangely, comforted.