Around the protective bubble of your comfort a wind is picking up hooved mythologies. The bee rides a plastic flag. On the way out we notice a quarter vending machine full of bouncy little brains. Animals make terrible human impersonators. We’re always looking upward, imagining. A crystal cat laps up sunlight.

I do not call to gods and guides occasionally, like an estranged relative, checking in. I call to them continually, for I feel them continually in the wonder of waking through dream’s residue, in the sun-wheel’s floral pulse, in deliciously bitter clock bites, in gently descending equations, in gravity’s pull on my beard, in exquisite nymph-songs, in the tongues of dead wizards, in the childheart unbanished, my mouth full of galaxies and my throat throwing colors I call, I call.

A faint red glow, a retreating star… it won’t escape. It was, and so it is and will remain entangled in memory. On the nerve-fed retinal field cones reach like leaves for light from the bottom of the eye’s ocean. A ghost star no longer there hangs in the sky, the myth of the present inscribed in a constellation. Would you find fame and be called a star? Would you ever shift away from their eyes? Will you be long gone by the time they name your residue of light?

I have patient feet. I wait for the signal. Wheels turn around me. People move themselves. The light changes. The light always changes. Is this your light, the light that you needed? This is not my light. My light is yet to come. The light changes. The light always changes. I have patient feet. I wait for the light.

For hours the rain soaked the cool ferns and cleaned the stones until the gray sky stilled and turned dark. Now our evening lamps are warm around the room and my love plucks strings with her clever fingers and hums a new melody — so light, so melancholy.