Colonial Skies

The dark of the sky is quite starless,
here the night is too deep for stars
and hangs too close to the ground.

By day the sky is like a child's drawing,
a scrawled bar of blue crayon above
the ground done in a dusty brown
as far as the eye can see.

It seems that if you drove far enough down the sweet
air-conditioned interstate highway
you could reach its end when the paper ran outlandish
and the horizon simply stopped dead.

Everything is low, as though it clings to the dirt in ignorance,
in fear that gravity will suddenly reverse and send it
falling into that vast open sky which at night
becomes an ocean of purple and black nothing.

At night the the stars fall as rain and thunder rends
the darkness like a god of classical myth vowed
to take vengeance on the dirt. Sometimes I wish I could
hide in the shadows back home where you are and
I would not be surprised if the same lightning lit your eyes.

As l lie now with my back across the hood of a new black Camero
in the now quiet parking lot, I drift back to my own
dark star and silently vow that I will never go home
and drink in the night and the cold rain like news of home.