Odd Night

[rejectomorph]

The lazy moon got up so late it's barely cleared the backyard oaks by five o'clock. This time of year, its waning crescent leans back, like an old man in a recliner. Before it rose, I enjoyed the starlit dead of night, watching the milky way flow by, (though it was in fact I who was flowing, describing an arc through the space I occupied on spinning earth) while savoring the quiet hours of the town's sleep. While the others have their dreams, I have mine, but wide awake. It's best that way. Then, as I dreamed, an image from something I once read came into my head, and I had to go into the house and look for it. It is this:

Appearance

by Russell Edson


There was a landscape once in a while where a rock a person and a pebble and will it rain one day, gathered one day to appear.

There was a landscape that became a room to search for a house, to decide to stay there, then to be old in a house it finds.

And so the sun came in a room's window and woke a person who poured coffee out of a cup into his head.

I have no idea why this night suddenly evoked one of Edson's odd prose poems, but there it is. Reality tends to turn into what is not expected. Sometimes I'm glad for that.