Blind Contour: Night Sky, number one.
Tonight the heavens murmur their promise:
a bright and distant violence.
And you've driven a switchback road
out past jagged small mountains that border west
this small and jagged town where your heart's
consecutive failures have been as carefully coded
as the codex of stars that fold in, out, in, out,
and tucked away in your breast pocket.
Because tonight, you hate yourself
for being lonely, recline against hood and windshield
dark and parked and gazing, because this is all you know.
Because you misbelieve.
Because you mistake yourself for ancient: vision unveiled
by saguaros yearning skyward, arms beckoning the gauzy ribbon
of dust and stars until the headlights fade
from your eyes' edges, but you're
still left dark and wandering.
Apogee begins to focus.
Betelgeuse, Rigel, arm and leg of Orion--
his belt, those diamond seams...
and you forget why it is he stalks the skies.
Draw your eyes back.
See the night for all her breath when coyotes ring their pale
and petty argument, and catch now, peripherally,
a streaking light, an acute and failing angle earthward--
all atmosphere and friction, a brilliant production.
A meteor, you know, milliseconds away from smoldering -ite.
And because it may amount to nothing--
a quintessence of dust--
cast your well-worn wish.