Nocturne

Tenuous tendrils stretch across the sky

like telephone lines, electric blue

and bold enough to stand against a usual dark.

Too high in the sky to be seen by daylight eyes,

their light comes from the bottom up,

like a mirage on a hot day, the heat

rises and turns the air into shimmer,

and they do. Almost auroral but not quite:

sibling, or cousin maybe - bland in its single

hue, that electric blue, those fingers

reaching only to clutch either each other

or the void they float in: an island of light

among the darkness.

Somewhere, there is a star with my name on it.

The telephone wires chart me a path to it.

But every time I pick up the phone,

it just keeps ringing.

And then the clouds dissipate.

And the line goes dead.

And I am left alone again

as if I wasn’t alone to begin with.