And Then, Gone | Elaina Edwards

And Then, Gone

When we decided to end it, I was stuck thinking of the night
---------with fried rice and blue calcite and all the orange
 light over rosé in the only restaurant open in town so late. 
-- - ------ - -  -- It is the middle of winter in Marfa, and you watch me
- - - - - - - - ---  run through downtown in the width of the blue moon
to the car so we can drive to the lookout off Highway 90
- - - ----and watch the Marfa lights flare, bounce 
and fall back down beside twitching desert grass. 
---------------- - - ------  There’s a couple next to us who has been camping out here,
---------------------------documenting this phenomenon every night for a week. 
- - - - -They tell us each light has its own behaviors, own patterns. 
---------------- They speak about aliens and energy. The army and angels. You’re not 
-----------------convinced by any of them. You whisper human possibilities
-----------------in my ear: maybe they’re cars moving on the highway 
------- over the mountain, truck lights, fast food signs…
--------I point to one yellow light pulsating so faint far 
------- out in the field, I must convince myself it even exists: 
pulsing and fading, fading, and pulsing, and then,
gone. There is a moment when all the lights go, 
--------and it is simply dark. Why do we keep watching? 
----------------  Goddammit,
--------------------------if we want to know what this is 
--------------------------why don’t we just run out and grab them?
But we don’t. 
--------------------------The lights reappear again and bounce off each other 
---------------- in silence. Melting and glowing.
---------------- We don’t want to know what they are. 
The joy is the obsession, the pondering, the pulsing. 
And the total darkness. Yes. 
---------------- It is also that. 

Elaina Edwards (she/her) is a poet from the Texas Hill Country. She has her MFA from Texas State University. She is an ecofeminist poet that loves to dabble in the supernatural. When not reading or writing, she watches way too much X files with her partner, Stephen.