More Moon, More Stars
I am the night when you close your eyes and see nothing, not even a dream or speck of color already fading, when I close a door on the ones I love and walk away, when I put a letter in the drawer and do not mail it and the words remain hidden from sight, oh, the frail, crippled words wanting so much to be read or spoken in intimate speech of cherished abiding—and I am the night in solemn march of dark when I blow out the candle and watch the wreath of smoke rise to disappear for disappearance is the hour of my birth and death and night kings me with its pitch, and I am the night, the threadbare, listening night when I reach inside the mouth of the fish to take out the fly and my fingers come away bloody above the trembling stream and then night turns me in every direction to swallow every light and music in me becomes the footsteps of a stranger on the sidewalk sounding the world in the hollowness of their trailing refrain and the language of a dry, dry stone, and then I ask darkness to hide me from myself for what am I to do with my hands that want to touch and hold so much, and the looming shadows of trees hunger for their bread loaved from the sun but more moon, more stars and these nightmost of all, darkening sky holding nothing between those points of light and I feel the nothing in the nowhere I am and night in me does not know how a flower reaches for the sun and night tells me bemoan neither fortune nor fate and I am night again beneath your eyelids and those thin places between this world and the next, and memory that has said everything it has left so that nothing, not even a cry or sigh or remembered gesture of someone reaching to open a window, is left for burning or other brightness, or the glowing leaf of a flowering pear tree before the wind tears it away.
About robert david vivian
RV has written novels, plays, essays, and short stories. He’s currently working on a collection of dervish essays.
