Because, now and then, for the well being of your soul, you have to evict the empty diversions, addictive distractions, the noisome bile, and ponder, in the brief space exhumed by an image, a note of music, a spiraling leaf, a stranger’s touch, a kindness, a child’s wonder, Earthshine married to sliverous Moon, in this volume of relief, this anomalous bliss, this sudden expanse of silence—how is it that we, somehow, have willingly mongered purposeful calm for mindless glitter, mere noise?—and reflect on the inverse of nothing.

Fast hairy monsters high up on a wall, incognizant of their fortune, being as they are—at least on occasion—and in more than one sense of the word, ascendant, beyond the ken of three prowling, ever-watchful, and even faster (as if that were imaginable, but imagination, I have noticed, often wears the Emperor’s illusory purple), hungry—or so they yowl at me, incessantly—feline beasts known throughout the land, their domain, not just for their sleek and deadly elegance but for torturing, and in turns dismembering, in that horrifying, playful, pure-sociopath way unique (one hopes) to their species—these nimble piliferous octopeds would be glad, if they but had the ganglions for it, that I spy them, at least some of them, first.