Absent

March 16 2020

The country road

winds leisurely back and forth,

steadily ascending

due north.

Cold

settles down on the earth like a weight.

There is a dusting of snow,

trees press in

on either side.

My headlamps seem so much brighter here,

the only car

on an unlit road.

But still

their wavering yellow beams

hardly penetrate,

swallowed up by the night

like a bottomless well.

I watch, in my rear view mirror

as the city recedes

and its light incrementally dims.

But an amorphous glow persists,

filling the sky behind me

and obscuring everything else.

Which is why city kids grow up

weak-eyed and bored

and unacquainted with night.

So I look ahead

into star-filled blackness.

A perfect backdrop

against which to search once again

for the northern lights,

that shimmering curtain of light

that makes the world small

and the silence seem deeper

and gives the mysterious form.

But just as before, they're absent

as they've been all season long,

in this exceptional winter

that's been far too dry and warm.

So I wonder if anything's changed.

Is the sun weakening?

Has our magnetic field waned?

Is the sky too hot, polluted, degraded

for their fabulous display?

Only hard pin-point stars.

And monolithic blackness

that's darker than dark.