The Long Night

The bars had all closed.  The full moon that rose intimidating over the Chugiach and followed 4^th Avenue was now setting across the Inlet.  Still perfectly aligned with the street but now muted by light snow.  Tonight’s artists and poets would transform back to laborers and lawyers.  Tonight’s lovers might awaken in a strange bed and wonder where the moonlight went, while others made love to concrete stoops and snowdrifts on Third Avenue.  Ghosts in day’s light where their art is unwelcome.

And I?  Where will I be?  My boots made for kicking shit slide and slip in this cold Paradise with its sculptures of dead fish.  No bed seems welcoming and this scarf seems more a hangman’s noose closing in on me than a heart-warming ornament.  No, it won’t be used for that final eroticism, the last act of a performance artist, the final statement of the writer, the dancers floating pirouettes spinning extinguished candle held by the wick.  I haven’t the heart…but sometimes there is a yearning, because the nights are long in Anchor Town.