The horizon devours itself hourly. Each minute a conflagration of impossible colors, ochre, vermillion, gold-leaf scraps from some celestial workshop. We call this ordinary. We call this Tuesday evening. Between the watching and the darkening, between your breath and mine, the sky performs its ancient alchemy. Distance collapses. That burning sphere is both 93 million miles away and inside your iris. What is time but the slow burning of moments? The clouds, caught red-handed in theft of light, scatter evidence across the atmosphere's canvas. I want to say something about endings, about beginnings, but the sunset refuses metaphor, refuses to be anything but exactly what it is: a star's light bent through dust and memory, a daily apocalypse we somehow survive. You stand beside me, your profile edged in fire. The world turns away from warmth, again and again, and still we gather at windows, on porches, at the edges of oceans, to witness the burning.
