The hole in the moonlight is like an unshifting
shadow, something missing in the field of night
sky. The breeze lets a few bars of its music trace
the place our shoulders meet. We are not
the void we see. We are not what the weather does
alone in the mountains or the scent of a splinter
when it, at last, falls completely to dust. I know
the breath we are sharing is sewing a closeness
we will wear like air, like skin, like a faith that needs
no god. Time crickets around us, its legs ringing
with the resonance of its whole body—every motion
a note trilled into our memory. Our memory. We
syncopate across these hills and this river. We are
a new rhythm, a new pattern in the wind-combed
reeds. Tonight, the world adjusts to us. The hole
in the moonlight is because our fresh light is
bright enough to, by contrast, make that pale glow
darkness. Here, in the soft warmth of our choosing,
night moves around us like dust beginning to star.
