Aurora Borealis

Through the darkened mast and rigging
apparitions abruptly appear in the night sky high above.
Colored crumpled paper magically unfurls itself revealing
a bejeweled tiara spinning like a cosmic crystal whirligig
on a dark field of rippling steamy lavender.

Imagine our surprise as these celestrial lights
dissolve and marvelously re-solve themselves again
as skiers slicing a powdery slope, executing smooth
christianias superimposing their silvery symbols
over a sliding snowface of twinkling open space.

Shadowy secretive motion next resolves
as row upon row of transparent chorusline dancers
in charcoal blackened suits of cosmic flame
pirouette through sheer undulating curtains over a
dance floor of silvery slivers of sliding skyscape.

We sleepless sleepers spy automatically into our void by
means of some mysterious force which has whisked away
all our antique dreams of life upon wings of whispering white fire.
Some supernatural force must exist in these images to tear us away
so effortlessly from all the symbols of our too comfortable lives.

Our secret hopes and dreams and time itself are mysteriously vacuumed
skyward into these shadowy chimeras by their wondrous strange powers.
Then suddenly, just as we think we are beginning to see them clearly,
they shimmer once more and drop away leaving us forever searching the sky
for something—a sky dance perhaps or just the stardust left behind a comet.

Like the dead, we are dropped hard back into our weary wooden world.
We look at each other like cone-headed orphans returned from outer space,
our transporter departed, leaving us on a strange ship's deck suspended
between a dark sea and an even darker sky. We put our cone heads together,
but all we can recall is something like fireflies in a glass jar on a summer night.