The News at Four A.M.

I wake to a slow dripping outside my window, click on the news, then remember the recycling has to go out.

My feet find the path without a flashlight. I wade through faintly visible fog, a soundproof room inhabited by the automatic lusts of insects.

Halfway to the road, I come to a halt. There in the darkness at my feet, from glowworm to glowworm

something is passing, it seems, fading out at one spot only to come back on a few feet ahead:

a faint, cool signal making its way over the hidden face of the earth.