A Midnight’s Gaze
A small side street intersects about two hundred feet down the block and stops, a three-way intersection. On one cold night, not long ago, I stood in the middle of this intersection to steal a small city glimpse of the stars. It is a logical place to gaze at the heavens because it has the most ‘space,’ no roof ridgelines, trees, or chimneys too break the view. It also has a streetlight, one of the big ones, twenty-five feet tall and burning like a roman candle. It puts a hurt on the stargazing and causes one to contemplate the irony. The streetlight is here for the same reason I am, not the stars but the space, because it lets in the most dark. In the one crack of wild sky that this street will allow we have put a beacon of development, a testament to safety, justice, and our blind allegiance to all things luminous. Blinded by the light.