The cold front, passing, dissipates the clouds for icy night which bursts with stars. I watch them gleam until my ears grow numb, then go indoors to warm myself with spicy orange tea. Later, hearing the leaves dropping from the mulberry tree, I am enticed back out by the thought of a cold breeze making all that blaze of starlight twinkle. But the air is still. The leaves drop from the cold alone. No longer is the sky black and every star perfectly clear. Instead, there is a haze of thin fog which glows faintly red with reflected town lights. Fewer, and dimmer, and slightly blurred, the stars burn on, but the clarity is lost and the night made ordinary by its passing. Only then I saw a meteor, its brief burn making a streak of a few degrees. An event! Some bit of ice has ended its long sojourn in space and boiled away to join the atmosphere of earth. Its atoms will drift and settle, be caught by winds, subsumed in clouds, surrender utterly to gravity's demands, to fall and enter a new journey through plant and flesh, through cold blood and warm, through soil and rock and sea, to sky to earth again and again, through ages clocked by the turning globe which has plucked this fragment of some ancient object from the vastness where it wandered. Ah, I think; More water for tea! Then I go in.
flying_blind) wrote, 
