Smiling light, a poem

I saw my old friend tonight in
the early evening of the late spring sky.
She was a bright and slender bow,
new again, unfurled in the twilight.
Upon reaching home, I walked
toward the new planting of the
cornfield at the end of our road,
to watch her sun-turned face for
a moment before I retreated inside.
It had been a spirit-squashing day —
I was a grey little moth, drawn
to a friendly curl of light.

She had a sideways smile, in recline
like a drowsing Cheshire cat.
The rest was invisible, dark as
a stony Ardhanarishvara at
a whitewashed temple.
I wondered if she was watching
something funny: a cosmic TV sitcom,
off and away on the glowing horizon.
Maybe though, it was about her mate
lying just behind her, kissing the bumps along
her curving spine. Or, perhaps, it was only
some momentary delight, as when you spy
the first jeweled evening star. Soon
the night would flower full of them, and
my friend would sink down deep,
into her bed of obsidian feathers.

I hoped that she might dream of me,
dream of every one of us down here,
sunk in this animal gravity of days.
In her dreaminess she would turn, and smile
a tiny and secret smile in her rounded sleep,
sensing our own small dreams, our strange mysteries,
lifting into the sky. They float upwards to Luna,
passing by like a harbinger breeze, a cloud of
giggly fireflies and sad raindrops. And into
the thundering deep they slip away from us all,
billion upon billion of earthen lullabies unearthed,
fluttering fitfully toward the far hazy fields
that swarm with beckoning lights.

by Dave Zzathros