Who are you to sit there and tell me joy comes in the morning,
when here it is nighttime,
full dark,
and the moon, orange, is hanging low and smeared by fog like soot,
the moon a filthy, burning thing?
Who are you to tell me joy comes?
Who are you anyway?
Oh look it comes, you say, just wait, like the man on shore squinting out through field glasses at a brown and churning ocean, pretending he sees a whale.
What do you gain by that?
That smug dissembling?
That made-up life-line to divinity?
As if you see beyond what can be seen,
huddled here in the full dark with a moon on fire.
I cannot believe that morning comes to a night like this;
leave joy out of it.
Wouldn’t morning flee from this?
Pull back her sunlit tendrils, hide them behind the clouds again,
like a woman,
drawing up her skirts to sidestep the gutter?
Morning will not be dirtied by this.
We are dirtied by this.
You and I sitting here,
you gone silent.
The moon on fire lights your hair through the window.
Your hair is red, a little.
I don’t think it’s just the light.
I never noticed that, before,
or did I,
once, years ago. A gravel road;
a state I can’t recall.
We came upon a millpond suddenly,
startled the geese,
who lifted; you lifted
your arms in salute,
one V to another;
I think I saw it then.
The red in your hair caught by tendrils of sunlight
Joy catching you out that morning.
The silence carves a cavern between us.
I look out over the edge of it, see it widening, sides smooth like a singing bowl.
I could say, “Your hair is red in the moonlight now”
could say, but I don’t say, I let the silence tremble.
Are you trembling?
Or is it just the light?
Who are you, there, anyway?
And who will we be, come morning?
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