Gamma rays burst, looping blue flashes at the center, making me something I am not. My body feels cold, like a photograph of night torn to pieces then reassembled in the shape of three crescent moons. You turn to watch the comet dust settle on our hands, but something gets in the way when you reach out to touch my lips, many uncertainties too numerous to count. There are parts of my dream that feel like an open field of long dry grass blowing in the wind on a sunny day, but the other parts remain in shadow, the color of night and the idea spreads its wings suddenly flying into the distance where you feel warm or alive or maybe even somehow real.

It was odd that the sky should have had a contented look, now that the snow was so thick across the gardens, open to all military officers and finite ideas about love. So we stayed inside looking out through the symmetrical vacuum of space, wondering–what is it exactly? What exactly is it that makes us feel we have everything we’ve ever wanted right now? So I cried, running to meet you in the light distance, inside and outside but mostly somewhere in between, where the snow never touches anything near the heart.

If there were anywhere else I could hide my heart straining not only up to the heavens but also out to sea, I would hide it in the waves–in the waves deep below, in the dark water where my heart dreams separate from my body. My head is in the clouds meanwhile, keeping track of time by the moon. Seashells are everywhere, doing their own soul- searching, giving me glimpses of distant landscapes where you seized me and swept me away beneath some hazy trees while a hornets’ nest buzzed, I curled into my furs and slept again. Falling into the Black Sea in large numbers of fearless somersaults, turning away from what lay beyond some melted inner- tubes and hundreds of ironclad warships, I sank past even my desire, yet knew I was never farther than a half- day’s swim from my savior. Still I couldn’t see any way to get back, since it was so much easier to be brave when I was asleep.