aurora

I want to see the aurora before I die,

the loops and whorls painted against darkness,

glitteringly, starkly polar.

I drove north one winter night in new england, hoping to find it,

a trace of it,

lurid tendrils stroking the sky from the arctic.

I do not know if the aurora happens like that.

-- if one may reach the edge of its embrace,

allowed near it, never under its canopy;

or if it opens up the night at will,

throwing the world into brilliant alien relief.

I never found it, of course.

there is no place for such things

in the placid villages of New Hampshire, the staid forests of Vermont.

on empty roads, with the sky stretching blankly above,

punctuated only by mountains and stars,

I could almost anticipate it, as though

the glow in the distance, a small town, probably,

would erupt around the next corner

into sudden fire, a geometry smeared between the stars.

but it was only the town, that glow;

turn after turn, the light faded back into its sky,

in virtuous obeying of the order of things.

the lights of the city grew, eventually,

throwing its own defiant aurora.

the slow fading of the stars,

the fading of the black;

dreams of other worlds, muted by streetlamps.