i am writing you it is the longest night of the year.  there are astronomical charts and time tables which tell me this is so.
no matter when you read this let it be known: I wrote this on the longest night of my second obelisk year.

I am vigilant.  the birds are asleep.  crow/parrot is nesting on the teapot. black swan’s head is tucked into a wing with a hammer.  hawk’s claw clasps a chisel.  starlings sleep in my tree, which is perfect because they will rustle and chirp at exactly the necessary moment.

I have an obelisk-improvement plan which begins with our marking tomorrow’s first ray of light.  I’ll show you what we do, but you’ll have to wait until next year.

now, now now, cold and colder (metaphysically).  the obelisk receives information on its obtuse cosmic angle as it (as we) tilt far back on our polar heel, away from the atomic crematorium called sun.  I am wearing my coat and holding phoenix, who burns my candle at both ends.

i don’t like these long nights.

tomorrow night will be one minute shorter than this night!  every minute counts when you’re all alone in an obelisk and your friends are birds who go to sleep with the sun.

correction: owl doesn’t sleep with the sun, but where is owl?  out torturing the rodents who plant seeds in my bed when I’m not looking.  all kinds of seeds stashed in my bed!  will they sprout to my warmth when i sleep sound?

i sleep in sound.  mice eat the seeds.  owl eats the mice.  owl eats the trees, twice-removed.  the marsh flowers and the burnet grasses.

i like my solitude, but these dark days weigh heavy on me.

are you awake, too?  hush holy in the old days, before people like you and I understood the earth’s axial tilt, how it–not the sun–moves.  There was a time when night-wakers-we would labor with rites and song to call back the cold sun.  come back, chariot of cosmic fire!  run your course directly o’er, you barely crest the distant edge of our apparently flat fields.

people like you and I, night-wakers-we, would worry about star-lit days and moon-less night.  the trees are already dead and if the sun said “no, i won’t come back” and didn’t, they would have stayed that way, bare of leaf, electrical snappage in a voltless day-called-night.  we would have been eaten by the night-hunters, like owl.

crow-who-is-parrot cracks one eye as if crow were wholly crow, and croaks “some day some day”.  it is true.  one day the sun will burn out.  go back to sleep, parrot-who-is-crow.

I am glad to KNOW that this is the longest night this solar year.    Tomorrow night will be a little bit gentler than this one here.

my winter solstice, 2013 scrapbook page.   happy hol [ly] days.

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