At 4 A.M.

Evan Izer, Distant skyline (paper negative) , c. 1992

In a dark yard in a sparse town,
under scattered starlight
in September, the rasps
of three cricket's wings
move in and out of phase
above a low, coastal kind of sound
that is not water,
but the hiss of distant tires
washing up and down US 30.

"If I would follow that road, miles north,
it terminates in Times Square,
and I would be home again"
I tell myself.

But distance and time are tangled;
New York, my life, everything,
it all still flickers and glows, faintly
like the scattered stars, lights in dark skies,
whose distant sources may have darkened
and disappeared—
but, for now,
the light still comes.

And then I think of a boat in water,
again in darkness,
navigated, steered,
as they once were,
by the light of stars,
both there and not-there.