Vesper Line

We draw the things we cannot keep, as if a line could hold what a hand could not.

By this hour the trees have thinned to faint spires against the paling sky. What is left of the day comes down in fine vertical threads, the last glow resolving into lines fine enough to count, falling steadily into the dark. Beside them a plain grey field waits, patient as a page. The light has become something to set down, line by line, before it goes.

There is a kind of keeping that is not holding but recording. We make a mark of what we are losing, so that a trace of it outlives the thing itself.

The light itself is long gone; only its record remains, a few fine lines held against the dark, keeping the shape of the hour long after the hour has passed.