Winter Sky at Nightfall

The sky is a dusty plum hue washed up into darkness; the mountains beyond the lake look bruised with scarlet and lavender. The imagination focuses there, in the mountains, where anything might be. Goats climbing with bells hung beneath their throats, a cottage with smoke bending from its chimney into night’s sky; clouds lifting, blanket of star fields, tonight. 

 

Is there a place where dusk lingers not for minutes but days, a place where the night sky opens as slowly and unexpectedly as hyacinth bloom? I long for this place. I want nothing of the brusque colors of morning. The outer world of winter calls to me when the shadows of the day fall long across the field. The sky clots with pre-dusk clouds that tangle their way into a distance of longing, a sky-scape of ache. Here, the body, a fledgling spirit in the ancient world, pulses with loneliness, a holy water.