Dear Friend [In the dark, let’s meet]

Dear Friend,

In the dark, let’s meet at the cemetery

near solstice, while the cold’s still companionable

and the gates to the underworld stand unguarded,

luminaries anyone might drift through. Tonight

let once-familiar paths erase our days, our names,

then draw us toward bewilderment by the vaults

where figures tilt into a shadow boundary:

parabola, annular eclipse, Vaughan’s ring

of pure and endless light pinned earthbound, wreath

for absolute abyss. And peace, maybe, or rest?

Voices nudge us onward, before the thought’s complete.

Trees turn alien, serene. Their sapphire boughs arrange

the sky as starling bones, when magnified, cradle

seeming-empty hollows; as in the mirror deep

roots sculpt chambers out of loamy seas—

Friend in the dark, do you feel it too?

How this ground’s not solid, but like the present

forms a nexus, porous threshold coupling realms:

breath to bone, aquifer to apple-fall, mycorrhizal

mesh to wind-shorn leaves, percussing—

Somewhere a door in the night opens.

Out pour the comforted and the lost, congregants

transfixed by the chapel’s veil, its rippling

resplendence of artful stars. Will you turn

to join their awe, or should we stray together longer?

Tonight, the lots are gardens full of moons that bloom

pale blue among the tapers and the graves. Friend

in the dark, if you lose me, don’t be troubled:

the candles burn with harmless fire; I’ve only stooped

to read the names. Tonight, this longest night,

there’s just our strangeness left to set ablaze.