[continent]

Letting the dog out back for her morning run. I follow suit, past sliding glass, and lose her to the dark. Something about a sky full of ink and looking up, [reflex? need? an answered call?]. In the space between two canopies, Orion. Through atmospheric haze, the Pleiades; seen with a shift of feet, a slightly higher gaze. There are no birds yet. Not a single car. Just a dog rustling through the dark; the odd acorn like a marble pitched against the roof. The musk of dew-damp grass, the growing mat of dead fig leaves beneath the tree, the sour-sweet of spent tea olive blooms—some which find their way onto the dog’s back as she re-emerges. Can that be all we have now? No opinion about what devours us, our neighbors? What we feed to clocks, to the already full? Someone else is outside now. Maybe we are finding ourselves here. Maybe what we hold inside are disguises, mirrors to numb our wildness. If but for a moment, a minute or so, we are a nation. Two opposing coasts of a continent, the sun nowhere to be found.