Lunar Light
Daniel Christensen
I am lonely when I draw the hours and years between us, drifting further apart, when I look at the moon and see you, waving from that height
When I drink warm coffee on a cold morning, I am too full of life and warmth and cold to think or feel, light strays through my arm hairs like wind in cornfields
There is a place I inhabit, within myself, so that I am a citizen of my solitude, I carry it with me like an ethnic identity, a lineage, when I am with others, in a crowd, so that my nation is enveloped quietly, but retains surface tension, my loneliness is a bubble on waters, then
And we are alone, together, when I trace the crow’s feet around your eyes and smell the tobacco on your shirt, when I listen to your joints pop from a long day on your feet, when I watch a child skating down the sidewalk, drowning out the world with music
This world holds a soft countenance of us, as we pass along and through it, at first, swift and frantic, then, down through the soil, in slow digestion
Grief, then, for the growing distance between us, white star of the evening, quiet in your daytime somnambulation, quiet when you hover before me, pale and new
Until grief grows bored of itself and washes toward comfort, toward a wordless awe that fills me up with intimacy, with knowing I could never be more than a molecule in a tapestry, could never be less alone than this web of being
And all my reckless thrashing against the arms that knit me together becomes a moment-to-moment love affair with myself
Lonely is what we call it when we are with ghosts, when they are with us
Daniel Christensen
Daniel Christensen is a caregiver residing in Central Florida. He is an author of poetry, science fiction and high fantasy stories. His poem "Salt" was printed in the March 2024 edittion of Down in the Dirt Magazine. His poem "A Memory of Sunlight" was printed in the April 2024 edition of CC&D Magazine. His poem "Of Colors" was featured on Book XI and his poem "Brooklyn" won the Editor's Choice Award for The Last Stanza Magazine.