Your Event Horizon

I miss that, sometimes: the normal, natural phenomena,
the approach road running aground in a clearing.
Someone says the lights are out, above and past
as light is. We’ve battened our homes to land,
given the domestic up to ballast. A car arrives, another,
a wilderness of bikers, slowly the pedestrians.
Scanning the distance for the incoming event:
a wave cresting too high for its fetch, rolling tidal
to this headland. The sulphured illumination of fireworks
writing the sky: recovered twilight. A glacial tremor,
unrest shuddering—the visible sign the interior’s
shifted—the headland, then the tumult of debris.
Evening ending unchanged: the lift of bay wind, the fade
of bay wind, our conversations whispering out.
We set our watches to geologic time, depart.

Lytton Smith