The fog is shrouding tamarack
and a flawless black sky
as frogs trill from turbid pond water,
but she doesn’t know.
She emerges from our room only to eat
and ask whether Andromeda chose to show
over Cadillac Mountain
or if Venus sailed down the Penobscot
out into the Atlantic. I avert my eyes
from her withered outline and pretend
I can’t hear her.
Mornings, I wake to shade
cast broadside by conifers that gather twilight
in the long afternoons
as she sleeps, hours before the sun has gone,
while I go walking on Morgan Bay Road.
Yet dusk always comes.
So I lower my gaze,
linger under lampposts in denial
of the million suns
spinning out like streams of spores
exhaled
from toadstools on the forest bottom,
then return to her labored wheezing.
I’m told we have the darkest skies
this side of the continent
and that one can see galaxies
twenty million light years far.
But now the fog is shrouding my eyes
as a breeze slips from the bay,
and she is sleeping
soundlessly
in a halo of silver locks.
A frog splashes into water.