Quiet Night

[rejectomorph]

Tuesday. This is the last day before the solstice on which there will be no moonrise. It rose just before midnight Monday, and will rise again after 12:30 Wednesday morning. A deep quiet has lain over the forest through the night. The clouds drift, lighted by the half moon, but the wind that carries them does not descend to earth. Cold and still, bathed in pale light, the landscape here seems sculpted from dark stone, or each branch and twig and untrembling isolated leaf as though etched on some transparent medium lain against the ghostly, barely blue clouds. The few stars which now and then emerge from the gauzy drift remind me of ship's lights twinkling on mastheads. I imagine them arriving here after long journeys only to find this frozen garden enchanted into silence, existing outside time; a place where all that stirs is thought.