Dark Thirty

All year, death, after death, after death. Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky, God putting on a show of tenderness, nothing like thoughts that rise and drift in my mind, like flakes shaken in a snow globe, and my brain laboring in its own night, never feeling the punky starlight of dark thirty, the time a friend said for us to meet and had to explain it was half an hour after the first dark, when daylilies fold up and headlights lead the way home, but maybe too early to find the moon turning half its body away, holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief breaks over you when you've already given all you've got and hands you tools you don't know how to use. The blush of dark thirty turned bleak when I heard about the O— O dark thirty, military time for 12:30 a.m., hour of the deepest dark, when, if I'm awake, as I often am, a storm of thoughts battle one another, now settling unsettlingly on the ways we make war and flaunt it. Take the Civil War double cannon the lawn of a city hall in the deep south, twinned so that two cannonballs chained together kill two at a time, often decapitating. And why did a small town, population 932, in rural New Hampshire, import a ballistic missile to crown its village green? Brecht's line floats up: "Pity the nation that needs heroes," but what to do with the guy pontificating on the Middle East, telling me with the gravest authority— that of stupidity—the reason for the strife there: "Hatred is in the rocks."