The Empire Of Lights

I must have shot 30 or 40 frames. My fingers were numb. Only this one came out.

Samuel Palmer was the first painter who came to mind, with his sickle moon harvests. But a friend just reminded me of Magritte's L'Empire des Lumières which is far more apposite, even though there's no moon in it.

I am often reminded of that painting while walking through this little suburban park in the evenings with our JR, Lola. This time she became impatient with my photography, stopping and starting, propping the camera on rocks or fences to try to keep it steady, standing on her lead to keep her from bolting off into the delicious dead-leaf-strewn animal/earthiness. Poor dog. You can't smell the moon.

Sickle of course, fingernail paring. But what else? Larkin's anti-Vers de Société moon 'thinned / To an air-sharpened blade.' Auden's 'presence to glop at.' Sir Patrick Spence's 'new Moon, / With the old Moon in her arms...'

It's the clean, slip-case geometry of those phases, so unlike a lunar eclipse where Earth's coppery shadow rapidly transfuses its tincture into that dish. Lunar phases = a model clock, rewinding itself. Both compliment and rebuff to all those unpolished, half-finished lives below.

Was it my mother told me not to cast the first glance through glass?

A lopsided smile, shockingly thin.

A fine rib of fishy light
minting
a cerulean space helmet.

A bulge. A welling, lick
of sun testing its metal.

You can peel the metaphors off, though they all seem to spell

winter.