A swath of the moon’s surface hangs
in the dusk, a fruit
the warm air is swollen
enough to bear.
The sun’s angle brightens the sky’s
inside, like eyelids,
the planet a jewel as always but
only now giving that special
angular wink.
The vault of the sky comes close enough
for an echo, but still if I speak softly
my words don’t come back.
The day’s flat, bright trajectory
turns from novel to short story, and then
dipping golden into the trees
to poem, to vanishing haiku.
It submerges unceremoniously
before telling all its secrets,
and the empty twilight, for all its
clear-headedness, can only make guesses.
There was more to this ending:
the sun was really setting on
the story’s broader themes, invisible
to the protagonist, felt only
as some kind of gravity, the sense
of falling around a star.
Knowing it is already eluding
him again.