A Cup of Tea

The moon is lost tonight
in torrents of persistent rain. We are together in a cabin,
safe and dry and warm, you peacefully sleeping
and I awake writing these words. Once, as
a child, I looked out across the pond nearby

our house. Rain had filled it to the brim, expanding
the circumference of its goodness. I looked
with uneven eyes, letting the countless
and unfathomable combinations
of words gathered

bewilder my mind and heart. Images
discordant to these combinations
overwhelmed my imagination
and reason, the way light traveling from
the star of our sun enters our earth

pressing it, innocuously almost,
until the earth can do no more
than return the gentle light
as heat. But we are in a cabin and I was
recalling looking at a pond

in a state of overwhelm
at speech and image and language. Had some
invisible and innocuous energy really entered me, unbidden,
from somewhere? How does anybody, starlight
being what it is, master such

a thing? One day our earth
may burn itself to cinder. One day a vine may travel
the visible length of an oak, releasing and returning something
unbidden, infusing what is visible with
the glimmering scales of a caught sunfish.

 

--Nathan Spoon