Sliver of a Second

The sky is an ashy, gray-edged heather rug of purple
Tasseled with a silver-white moon,
Curled in the shape of a sleeping cat,
Or a woman at a window seat,
Watching the world go by,
A pregnant belly of sky before her,
Time and space ballooning
In the crevices between night and day
Like late violets blooming,
Between the marble-colored evening star
Already risen
And the yellow-orange flinty stretch
Of life and daylight still flaming
Across the horizon,
Coppering the fields
That have known the touch of frost
So early in the season.

The moon is hung like a peg
Between trees, frayed and ropy
As twine, the hue of black licorice,
Moss and curtains of snarly branch braids
Hanging down like children from playground monkey bars.
I still see the moon peeking through
This semi-circle Palladian window,
Watching the world go by
As we return its gaze,
Looking back
At a slice so close
To being slivered away,
Like a splinter of wood in your finger,
Extracted quietly, delicately,
At the end of a summer’s day
Before you slowly slip into sleep,
Soon, this shiver of light, a quiver of soft white moonglow,
Will be washed away like rare seaglass after a storm,
Absorbed somewhere into the depths of sand and water,
An ocean of what was,
And what promises to be again.

Still, I see the sunset’s watery signature,
Letters half-erased
As though by tears
Before they were sent to the post,
Through rotting, falling beams of a barn,
Grateful to have seen it once,
The unrepeatable song,
The colors that can’t be replicated
No matter how many times you mix a new palette,
Glancing at your key,
Boxes of chroma, prisms of a code
You try to unlock each time you pick new paints,
But are happy to discover
Even just a single time,
Because that hope existed for a sliver
Still embedded in your dreams.
Remember that joy of finding color amidst the gray
As you drift off to sleep.