The sun and moon play at conversation
over the cotton bush clouds. White
Pips are diving hard at early evening moths
like gnats after ones tinier still from
where they lay.
The moon grows sleepy,
the sun, red in the face and stammering,
ducking in and out of picket fence trees
along high hillsides. "I can see her.
She's closing her eye."
He takes his mind away from the evergreen basin below,
Pips chirping and diving, paper shreds,
between and over occasioned kites and kite strings
beneath the bellowing sun,
to watch the moon.
The half. Seals. Shut
into the violent serenity of the sun screamed red sky
behind the elliptic silhouette
of the Em Nocu Em,
slipped through the skin between
upper atmospheres and slowing
to a halt in the space between
their eyes and hers.
Sunward windows blaze and fade,
orange back into deep red,
embers from the tip of a trunk
not quite on fire, but threatening,
over the spears of trees hilltop high enough to nearly touch the hull
of the starship large enough
to be, where she rests,
the largest city the country
will ever contain.
"Do you think they can see the parades
from out there?"
Banner kites fly alone,
the Pips gone to full belly sleep,
pennant strung tails waving in cold night air,
horns and drums making their way up the hill's side
to their ears.
"No. My mom says
if they did, they would not care.
They have their own way up there."
"Twenty years out," he nods,
eyes still
where the moon is gone to sleep
and ball lightning red
still winks and flare orange weeps
against a sky coming black,
"twenty years back."
A hole in the sky, miles wide. Sun tantrum dead.
Tufts of cotton whipped, no moon, overhead.
Thunder crowds into their ears.
The lights along Em Nocu's sides
outshine no star, held fast, in the clear space beyond her,
before her.
"My mom says,
they are building batteries out there
on that planet burned away to its core
with veins of soft metals
that only grow out there with that blue sun
that the new ship they are making there
will need nothing
outside of itself
for centuries."
"I am not going."
"I was not going to ask you
to come with me." Beneath the break in the evergreens
on the grass where they lay
the kites and Pips alike
have gone away. The parade
dies down. Everyone in the streets of the town. "Landfall comes tomorrow.
Last year was like a meteor shower
in reverse on the second day."
"How long will you stay?"
Em Nocu Em, close to Earth
as she is, disrupts weather patterns
for weeks. Thunder crowds again
from the sea beyond eyesight.
The dark between here and the nearest galaxy next.
"My mom told me
next year Sunlight Mercury is due to arrive.
She said a lot of people died
along her way out there.
I will not
be able to volunteer. After she goes,
I will be too old."
Across the depth of valley
against another hill
a fire sparks, a yellow dot, in a clearing too black to see
and the evergreens bend
to the current pressing
through the air
inland from the sea.
"Whatever you decide to do,
do not forget
what sunset looked like on the day
you left."
"Are you awake?"
Your elbow playing my ribs like a sun warped xylophone
feels terrible. The grass is pricking my neck
like little kid fingers in a pinch fight I was not privy
to the rule review. My beer can is sleeping on my chest.
"I think your fishing rod is ringing." It is not.
I would ask the time, but I do not care.
You are beaming and I am flipping a square
on my back beneath the sunbow spitting color across the sky,
woolly cloud peaks across the hemisphere and
some day you and I will
sneeze at the same time and I will shout "jinx!"
Punch you in the shoulder so hard
you will blink away tears and I will
slip back to sleep
in the silence.
