Sky Glee

Last night, at the excavation: pig wine & a searchlight moon. We watched seven equidistant stars make a line of the sky & disappear. I don’t know what to tell you about that. It was man-made or it wasn’t. In America, the UFO commission came back probably. (Sometimes the answer is a shrug.) I went to them after because the night was already prised open & awake felt like the least I could do. We were skin, for a while. That & slick friction, the loud magic of another living creature. Feral & ready to bust the door down. But that was not the best of it. That came later, when we woke fitless tangled with the darkness still unspooling. I left, because I am always leaving. When I stepped outside, the galaxies were wild & impossible. I thought of the astronomers then. Their new term, noctalgia, for the pain of city lights drowning out the stars. Longing for a darker age. Sky grief, they call it. It should make you bereft, & yet. When I learned of the term all I could think of was its opposite. Sky glee, call it. Triumph as a milky smudge. I stood beneath the universe fresh-fucked & said yes, yes. For a moment there was no need to believe in aliens. Take instead this quiet magic: the night a nebulous gift to sneak through. Here so much blackness, the night glee my exit. This is the fence I clamber to escape.