Fingernail Moons

When the night is like an attic, with the heat just stale and barren and cloying and surrounding...like a gray red warmth in an evening that is just an annoyance.

A thumbnail moon slides a sly smile across a dusk.  It is reminiscent...does it want to be full, does it want to be pretty?  Does it stand out in the sky?

You sure did.  But not just a mere moon...you were unfortunately the sun.  The center.  You could bring an eclipse but you were always there in sweet-heat perfection.

You painted skies in pastels and evenings in oranges.  You tanned and you darkened.  You boiled inside of me, a source of energy, a bit of everything I woke to and slept to.

You were a blinding, tear-inducing stare that I longed for, went blind searching for as I gazed and gazed and gazed.  So much so that when I closed my eyes I could still see you.

I could feel you, on my forehead, on my cheeks...if left alone the tiny bubbles of blood coming to a boil.

You were a time clock of my day, a perspective.  I could tell it was morning and I could tell when it was evening.  I could tell when you were sad, or just somber.  It was full effect.  It was there even if in shade.

You were the light, pretty such pretty light in a corner of my world where you were the single largest part of the day.  You might have been somebody's lantern, somebody's companion but you were my afternoon heat.  My high noon.

In these evenings, when the long ago sun illuminates a fingernail moon, I think of the absence.  Where did the rest of it go?

It's a smoking hole in a dark that is barely lit by the skim of light.  It looks like a wry smile...of a time when you were such a center in a time when we were we.

And now it just reminds me of where the rest of you went.

High & Dry

Most days it just felt oppressive...the weight of an afternoon waiting to finally tip over and collapse in a spew of rain and thunder.

It was mid-summer, the perfectly balanced part of the season where the halfway point felt like the rest might last twice as long.

Each day felt the same...the exact and mirrored day as the one before...and most likely the same as tomorrow.

She was gone and her absence felt like a hole in his day.  There was no sweet relief of a brewing and darkening storm bringing some reckoning to an afternoon of high heat and humidity.  There was no stir of breeze.  It was still...a frozen time of oppressing warmth that clung to him like a shrunken sweater.  It moved with him, stayed with him.

She had done neither.

She had taken her rough-river colored eyes and slid sideways away.

She had disassembled her presence in her own quiet way...not loudly or disturbing but like a blink.

The sun doesn't seem to move, but he's sure it does.  Slight subtle movement across a sky.

She had emerged in his sky like one of the early stars, while the light is waning but brilliantly fighting for his attention, his gaze.  Only to disappear in the morning when the dawn blotted out the tiny light. Extinguished came to his mind.

It was hot again today...it was the same as yesterday.