Moonless
The cigarette smoke’s wan light takes a shade
of black from the night. The man taps a tiny ash
from the end. “My boy, my boy.”
His words stones, smoothed and softened by
the turning, slow and ceaseless, of an ice-edged creek.
The boy lifts the pot, tips tea out of it,
the tea’s earth-dark dropping into the cup’s
lightly shadowed white. Again the man’s lips
part and the cup touches them, the round white
eye pupiled by the emblem of its maker
rises to gaze upon the boy. The boy blows
steam from the surface of his own cup, sips,
and burns his lip and tongue. Empty as a shadow,
every earth-dark drop drained, the man’s cup
cools on its saucer. He pats the blue napkin between
his long hands, lays it over the unstirred spoon.
A cloud tears free of the mountain and wipes mist
from the Milky Way. The boy watches his breath
move away from the table. The man’s cup,
white as dawn, has caught one star on its gold rim.
The boy looks from it to the man’s still face.
Then he pours the tea. “I couldn’t,” the man demurs.
“I couldn’t. All good men must sleep. Even young.”
He laughs. No, he does not laugh. “Even old.
Must cross the waters that draw their dark
past the river’s stones. Each stone a dream.
Dream by dream alone he steps the width
of a valley that goes on forever, and a wind
blows softly on him or blows hard and sudden.
You have only hours to get all the way over,
who have to travel, from day to day night by night.”
The boy tightens the circle of his hands around his cup.
He lifts it again to his face, the steam too cool and the tea
again hot enough to hurt. But he drinks. And stops.
And drinks. When he has finished his cup
he feels wounded; he looks at the man whose face,
lit by no moon, only the blue of the snow, the thousand
dimnesses of stars, regards him or looks on something
other. “More tea?”asks the boy, the pot cold.
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