Moon Shadows
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
Beneath the moon, the sky lightened to a color too hopeful for gray and only a fraction yellow – the color that would take over when the sun came up. Treetops, the shape and hue of dead lightening scratched the empty sky. Through them the light from street lamps glowed blocks away, hovering in mid-air as spacecrafts might. When I was out late in the streets as a boy, the neighborhood light was sugar-colored, and it was intrusive to the houses nearest the poles. In the asphalt glowing electric white, we’d play tag around its edges, run and dive through it as though it were a swimming pool, or sit beneath it and read letters or photographs with handwriting scrawled on them by 13 year-old girl’s hands. We would stand and play with our giant shadows, moving as monsters would with high steps and slashing arms – both arms brought over the head slowly and then thrown toward the other person’s shadow (though the blow was never struck and and the receiving shape never jilted) and they facing you in the same fighting position. You could feel your arm move through their shadow and knew better than to expect it to connect, but felt strange that it missed.
At 6, the shadows from cars slant severly into lawns and across driveways. Mailboxes become three times larger and grow so tall until the sun reaches a high point, and the shape has to start over again.
One bird flies low through the sky’s rich color, nothing but a shadow itself, across the rooftops and sets down some place in the darkness. Windows begin to light in the houses and in many instances they are the lights in children’s rooms, whose expectations for the day are too great for them to sleep. They shake awake in the same disbelief that adults do, except the misunderstanding is that they can’t believe they ever fell asleep at all (not a stupor that it’s time for the day to begin). They find the light switches so that they can read or play with the dolls they fell asleep with until they hear a parent rise for the first morning bathroom visit or to make coffee.
All the while, the clocks tick out the time, and every moment in everyday has a purpose. In the night, I could hear them in places I don’t ordinarily notice. Across from me on the mantle, on a ledge in the bathroom, high on the wall in the basement, ticking, the arms jutting through the glass, keeping the rhythm, the beat for the day, and unrelenting in the practice. Slowly the hands move around, always circular, never in any other direction, the day a big dizzy loop that comes full circle in the spin. Hands rotate atop one another, always counting heard or otherwise.
The sliver that is the moon is almost completely disappeared. Now the sky is much more optimistic, the gray turned golden, blues softer and not as though about to turn darker for an impending storm. If the moon did disappear, the children woukd be the first to see it, playing silhouetted in the dead room light growing brighter and brighter, the features in their toys becoming more defined and the shadows beneath their own noses disappearing. Crescent moon, dissolving to nothing, sahring the sky, the sun as much as it likes to cast them, does not have a shadow of its own and no dark side, the way you do. Sleeping dogs who lie down before their masters, wake last, lieing at the foot of empty beds, delaying the first steps into the cold morning air or worse being confined to freezing backyards by owners who forget how cold it is actually. Now the sun has risen tall enough that it somes in high through the windows onto be spreads and open carpet, lights the hair of children who still lie sleeping in their beds. These are loft developments, and while it may not seem the traditoinal path that midwesterners are familiar with in homes and farm expanses, the intricacies are the same, the people with more similarities than contrasts, and the loves they keep the same, a love for animals, for children, for sunrises and for making a way for themselves. Where they live, the buildings are taller, the saphalt thicker and more common, but lives equally fragile and deep and complex. The sin shines on everyone and it’s never more apparent than here, the city, where some building’s light on comes to particular places, but it always comes.
