The moon is lost tonightin torrents of persistent rain. We are together in a cabin,safe and dry and warm, you peacefully sleepingand I awake writing these words. Once, asa child, I looked out across the pond nearbyour house. Rain had filled it to the brim, expandingthe circumference of its goodness. I lookedwith uneven eyes, letting the countlessand unfathomable combinationsof words gatheredbewilder my mind and heart. Imagesdiscordant to these combinationsoverwhelmed my imaginationand reason, the way light traveling fromthe star of our sun enters our earthpressing it, innocuously almost,until the earth can do no morethan return the gentle lightas heat. But we are in a cabin and I wasrecalling looking at a pondin a state of overwhelmat speech and image and language. Had someinvisible and innocuous energy really entered me, unbidden,from somewhere? How does anybody, starlightbeing what it is, master sucha thing? One day our earthmay burn itself to cinder. One day a vine may travelthe visible length of an oak, releasing and returning somethingunbidden, infusing what is visible withthe glimmering scales of a caught sunfish.