Night Lights

One summer during a lightning storm
you told me stories of absence,
how the sirens did not sound
at the waterfront
when you lit firecrackers there,

how your absolute fear
is not that you cannot feel shock,
but that you do.

Your voice then was voltaic
as the white veins
that open thunderclouds,
and its sound washed me
with memories of other nights,

how the dusk’s curtain
would drape itself over the lake
as the stars rode soft currents
like tea candles in paper boats,

how we would paint the lakeshore
with our forlornness
until we lay spent in the grass
like the husks of stars
cooling against vast space.

Once we drank the moon
from our bottle of red wine
while you gestured at the Pleiades,

wondering how shared heat
melts off into nothing,
how the novas of love
make dust from solid figures
glowing in darkness.

It was those seven ripe lights
that revealed to me
why the tenor strains of your speech
set firestorms in the heavens;

this was because you were brother
to night lights,
everlasting suicides that burned
vacancy into your soul
whenever evening came.