Night has come.

The evening’s ripples smooth themselves into a dark glass.

I sit here at my desk,

my grief cradled in my hands like a nestling

found abandoned in the thickets.

 

In the apartment across from mine, your lamp flickers.

I can make out your face, undulating in the shadows

your profile a pale, waning crescent.

You are hunched at your desk, shoulders tense,

your hands ash-like as swallowtail wing,

a half-moon of ink under one fingernail

(so close I could almost reach out and touch you).

 

Though we are strangers, we met once,

long ago, on the lonesome shores of that other hemisphere,

You lying beside me among the rushes, your tear-stained face streaked with

        the dust of Malebolge,

The memory so faint now it sits with the Pleiades’ dimmest stars.

 

Your pen whispers, that quiet staccato that is yours alone,

your breath carving each vowel, the words rising and falling.

 

Through the beveled glass, our eyes

meet for a brief moment, the length of a heartbeat.

we look away, embarrassed, conscious suddenly of being strangers

gazing into lives that are not our own.

 

You return to your writing,

I to my books.

Between us, the night swells.