Night After Night

August 4, 2010

Since, we buried you, last summer, in the baked, early August earth  — I have dreamed, night after night, of a bone white creature, with glinting eyes of Edenic green … offering me fruit, ripening in his fecund palms.

Denizen of a deathless world — he brought news of you … news that you were settling in nicely, and had discovered that you could create living jewels from the dross of mortal dread.

Here, in this keening dimension of decay — we speak of you often: — about how you had hung in air like a music note, how you had lilted over the landscape of disappointment — weightless as the dreams of humming birds.

It was I … who tried to quantify your presence, tried to track your spoor across vast deserts of empty air … demanding from you that you chronicle for me the living history of drifting lint.

Instead, you turned to me, wordless, and said, “The stars are seedlings; they are only possibilities of what is to be.”

Posted in Essays