Looking Out, Looking In

“The moon was an orange!” the little girl said –
“like someone took a bite out of it while flying in the sky.”
Without glasses everything was grey and bright, low light
gleaming off of skyscrapers above us. Shadows falling in strange places.
With glasses, a marigold circle in and out of black clouds.
This is what we came to see. To watch one another look up at stars
mid-day
and wonder why we are all here. Carrying cereal boxes and cell phones
saying things like, “wow” and “did you see it?” and “we should get back to work.”
As if.
As if the work was never out here, with one another, gazing at each other,
gazing at the stars, knowing it was all the same.

We begin tapping our fingers at the same time to some esoteric beat
in tune with the music that hides behind the veil of the universe, the sound behind the sound,
silently and not so silently guiding the waves and tides, the migration patterns of humpback whales,
or the timing of a seagull’s white wing turning as the sunlight hits it above the bridge on the water.
It could be the thrum of the Iroquois water drum, crickets in the thick of summer,
the first solitary notes of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2,
or the wind in the dogwood trees at the edge of the trail,
Maybe it is the sound of church bells, an organ at dawn,
a child crying in the subway,
the goat laughing.
Likely it is the flute,
and the way your voice lingers on vowels in “I love you.”