Three Shots Last Night

...that my camera just couldn't get. We all have those moments. You see it, it makes an emotion, your brain swirls, perhaps even your life blood drains low and absurdly, you either have your camera or you don't, you either have a great camera or you don't, you come upon a perfect image at a perfect time or you don't, and no matter what you have, no matter what the moment gives, you will never capture the shot through your lens as well as you saw it when it appeared.

The first one was a curve down on a street we walked in the late evening. We walked through it away from the house, down to the main road, the humidity of the night salivating over us, and cars passed us, the nasty little ones with the new halogen lights that blind the mother sear out of you, and we smiled and waved anyway. At the main road, no traffic, no sounds, no gleams over the horizon, and we turned around. But somehow the road had disappeared. We looked bewilderingly, fruitful and encouraged by each other, and took a step into what was the blackest spot on earth. I had never seen a wide spot so dark as a nighttime closet, yet we entered into it as if it were an event horizon we knew not the destination to. The faint edges of light from before, worthy of a shot, had faded into pure non-recognition. Our hands felt the only knowledge of the other.

The second was coming out of the black hole and up the hill. Before the canopy of trees unveiled the world again where the streetlights grew, a swarm of woodpecker-beak sized lightning bugs wrapped around something, some frizz of a plant, and lit up in turn as if being punched on a gameshow. It was something I had seen once before in N Carolina one night while driving through a swarm that lit the windshield in gruesome fashion, but this moment was almost a frozen delight. Nothing else could be seen or felt for fifty feet. Just these hundreds of little greenish lightbulbs flickering away for three minutes. I was reminded of Robert Redford running the bases after his final home run in the explosion of crackling light that humbled the field.

The moon over the sunset was the third one, just six minutes later. The sky was nearly black at this point, except for a dash of light-to-dark blue and a twinge of violet just above the trees. Now on the hilltop we could see a passage down into the valley surrounded by trees, but empty of brush. Like looking into a pinhole really. The moon was a sliver, a word overused yes when describing the moon, but it works. But it was wasn't just the illumination that could be seen. The dark surface of the forward portion of the moon, the entire round ball of battered mantle could be seen, a faint gray against a haze of color. Was the sliver covering the bare of the moon or was the bare of the moon feeding the sliver. They were wed, romantic, succulating each other, forcing their love in union over us. A smooth grasp of inlay and bulge, built to last at least for one cool night.