Three small rectangles of light
delineate my neighbour’s house.

A crescent moon hangs thin above the wood,
its sculpted, slender curve swerved into points.

Everything else is gone so deeply black:
starless, obscured, secret.  The bricks have melted;

the roofs have quietly collapsed.
Each night like this without street lights

most things are possible: like the dead
tending the lichen patches on their graves;

like the chance to say the words I once held back
when all that active daylight intervened.

His lights go out. Cloud has occluded the moon.  
Full black now –  I think of you in a city of neon,

siren-fluted. We are time-wrecked
and it’s too late to phone, too difficult to text.