See What I Say

My dog Bobby and I step outside into the soft summer night here on Waterhole Branch. The sky is a blue haze above the dark treeline that surrounds the small clearing beyond the steps. I look up and see half a moon hanging there inside a silver halo. And it’s the faintly luminous ring that silences my thoughts for a quiet moment, the smoky circle drawn around a tilted moonbowl that seems to have poured out one faint jewel, Venus, rendered dim by thin cirrus clouds.

There’s an odd shadow caught within the halo.

It drops beneath a line from the lip of the moon outward to the halo’s rim, like some invisible minute hand pointing to eight o’clock and draped with a dark velvet cloth that becomes threadbare toward its bottom edge.

Can you see that in your mind? Even Bobby stood by me and followed my gaze, but gave up and studied me instead, wondering when we’d go again. Can a writer’s description bring into some dreamy focus what I saw up there?

This is about two hundred words, but even if I used a thousand, I can’t make that proverbial picture clear enough to stop you in your tracks, turn you around, and lift your face up. Sometimes you really just have to be there to read what Heaven writes.