Three elms stand bright as bauxite against purple snow clouds.
                                         Someone has dipped the trees
                           in ink the very colour of desire. But three minutes on,

Their small moment past, the trees slump in the dusk; the cloud rolls north.
                                         The hill to the east, though,
                           is violet yet, and the clouds above it are mauve and yellow and grey.

The end of things, like the start, is often electric. 5.35 today: an essay in love
                                         and grief, so often paired,
                           in my experience—delight and fear, tenderness and panic.

What made me look up to see this? The useless world consoles
                                         even when one’s lost
                           in one’s several incoherent selves, one’s discontinuous narrative. The world

Flares. Beauty insists on itself; night insists on itself after that. And just as it does,
                                         this day, a kookaburra cants
                           and the violin slides like a woman in silk sheets all the way down to the end

Of the partita. I seem to have forgotten how to live my life. Something in me
                                         wants just one god,
                           one muse or another, the tree or the cloud. Magenta or cyan. Darkness

Falls: why, still, can I not bring my heart to rest like that? The world is neither right
                                         nor wrong. It is dusk
                           and then it is midnight, then dawn. All there is is earth, this single manifestation

Of eternity. And all one has to do is live, in joy and in woe. Perhaps in praise. And yet,
                                         offered two heavens,
                           I want only one. But which one? Did anyone else ever die of delight?

Tonight the moon is new again, shy as you were. She is an empty boat above the city
                                         in the pale estuary
                           of dusk. In her—nothing but beauty and longing. And something I let slip.