The cotton balls have begun to flee from the sky, at least,
But inside your mind they remain,
Pressing down with their existential vagueness,
Obscuring with their haze the core of the first stars of evening fading into sight.
Seeing, they call it, the set of atmospheric conditions that show or hide the skies.
You huff a sharp, dry laugh at the parallels.
The gold comes before the black,
Shading from citrine to rose quartz and amethyst,
All the way through to lazuli before finally yielding to onyx.
It pools in the trees, rinses over the cornices,
Drips through the window to seep into your prone form on the floor.
It is close, but not quite--
You seek a darker gold to soak in,
Filtered into the sublime by a hewn stone window with no glass.
It smells of old books and frankincense,
With the faintest tang of saltpeter
And the cool grit of eons forming the sedimentary rock beneath you.
In truth, it runs black and gold at once--
The holy radiance of absolute certainty
Glinting off the guarded abyss of the inexplicable.
Bathed in light, bathed in void--
They pour as one into your fibers,
So why do they seem determined to break you in two?
But no one has yet emulsified
The liquid paradox in which you soak,
And your core feels all but impermeable.
Every so often, a shining trickle seeps through.
Is the pathway clear at last?
Are there more rivulets to come, finally bringing the drought to an end?
Or have the cotton balls begun to drip?