Prose Poem

Under the night sky he looks up and out into the infinite. Like Cantor he counts and counts and fails to count it all. And he longs to go there, to see the space beyond the stars in the vasty blackness. But his grasp on the longing slips from his hands and the little boy inside him recoils in fear at the deep, dark reaches of the ethereal sea. The sea on which float all the wonders he can imagine, and none of them. In the cold he feels it all barren and beyond ken, and the unkenned is uncanny and so he retreats into himself and the hole in his heart where it tore. "Love is longing for the infinite," he hears whispered in the back of his mind, and his skin prickles in the cold. But it is not so, for he cannot long for what he fears. He cannot long for that forever garden, because he sees only the stars, and tonight the stars are cold. He shivers. A hand brushes his arm then and the touch of it, as if one of the stars had given its warmth to him, thaws the iciness in him. His arm finds her waist, then, and she rests her head upon his shoulder. "Love is reaching," he hears in the night. So let him reach. Maybe, someday, he will touch a star, and the boy inside him will not fear.