can you see that orb sitting atop May’s
spiderwort, a mobile moved by midnight slowly
slowly, slowly sailing from dusk to sunrise, a light
chiming in the dark cathedral of sky?
Sometimes moon rides its cloud-pedestal
close to the velvet horizon—at other times it hovers,
a free-standing eye above ocean, tides the strokes of its
beam fingers, quick, quick, then slow-rolling.
Can you see its rays carving out space
between October’s shorn branches, then filling in
the lacunas with a blue glow, chiseling stag’s antlers,
casting them in bronze, sharp & cold?
Tonight that lambency cuts landscape
into warm slices of silver on which cats prowl
in high relief, lions of Babylon at Ishtar Gate, & crocus
swell in bas relief, barely seen but traceable
by a nocturnal devotee hoping to have her fingertips
inscribed with a cosmic blaze.
~title taken from a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote
T.M. Thomson is co-author of Frame & Mount the Sky (2017), a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry, as well the author as Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019). She is a lover of animals, art, trees, surrealism, black and white movies, walking in autumn rains, feeding wild birds in winter, playing in spring mud, & bat-watching in summer. Her first full-length collection of poems, Plunge, was published by Uncollected Press in 2023.
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