This is the light that by any other name would be known as sunrise. The refraction attends to my bedroom wall just before 7 a.m., a time when dreams are peeled back across the distances of whatever future may be involved and regurgitated into the semi-awareness of now. The bedroom window faces west, the sunrise should not been seen from here, but this mist of light booms across my eyes and into my existence to become nothing more than ordinary. Here, in front of me, is the only clue that days are not made strictly of hours and memories.

I have not heard from Jude for days. Maybe weeks. The cold sweeps through the riverish depression of the freeway and into the broken pane of the double-paned window, inviting itself in to the alterier as a casual acquaintance. Once, after waking in each others arms in the middle of the night, Jude told me of her fears. I was one of them. We didn't speak for months after that, but kept one another close by way of moving through the same localities to catch a glimpse. to make sure the other was still alive. It was the cold months then too, as again now.

She had eyes, then, that read the magnificent complacency of lips too-strong purses; she would call out the fickle-minded for their displaced ironic sentiment. As for maneuverability, that came with the walking downwards, because up always meant a look back, the silent ghosting that comes when two face desire and growth simultaneously and refuse the social morays.

Against the morning I drew a thought back to sing, but the stones would not stop, and I was wrecked by outsiders forcing into my world. Startled I rose and fetched out the moment; it was a day not to recall her too often, to admonish myself for the incapacity of movement, the forsaking of all things green, just for one day.

The light should never have reached my eyes, but it has.