Earthshine

[Last year I wrote about the rain; it was the same time of year--the equinox--and it rained angrily for a day or two. I actually dreamed about it beforehand. This year, instead, I should write about the snow--how September is misleading and so on. But that's so commonplace--or maybe it's just differentplace.]

There's the earthshine you see, the shadowy nether-region on the moon that you think you see if you barely focus on, say, a highrise building slightly off in the distance, not far from the moon but not too close. I have two eyes, my left is an erased scantron bubble with a partial crescent, my right is Venus. I focus on them. They guide me. I'm a sailor on already-discovered, already-explored ground, land foreign only to me.

Fifth grade fire-red crayon shading clogs the horizon, about half of it. The mountains are purple, they are liquid, they are grey. They are disappearing.

I madly wish that I were mad. I want to be insane and isolated, holed up in a cabin somewhere, taking walking tours of countries I've never seen, prophetically afraid of consumption, addicted to drugs that I need and that I want, burning out bright and dying young and accomplishing all I ever needed to accomplish four years ago.

So then I'll just live in the earthshine--a place where you can never see me. Sure the rest of the moon will brighten and everything, its little monthly cycle thing, but when it shines loudest I'll be gone.

It is round, after all, and I know how to run.