So we stand hand in hand, waiting for anything

In an access of astronomical enthusiasm and socked in with cloud to the point that our usual star-watching park was a charcoal blank of light pollution, we chased the eclipse westward until the bands of overcast began to break and show us stars and finally the rust-smoked moon like a beacon ahead of us on Route 202. The radio stations fuzzed and spattered in and out of one another. We watched totality from the lawn of the Shutesbury Community Church, the blood-shadowed seas dimming further and then glowing out as sullenly as an ember in the roll of the clouds. The air smelled of pine trees breathing; the occasional sound of traffic a mile off rose like a river. The leftover slumps of snow at the edges of the roads looked like the ghosts of dry stone walls. When we turned from the moon, the circumpolar sky was so thick with unaccustomed stars, I needed to borrow spatch's phone to find Polaris and my best guess for the source of the unexpected meteor-streak is the low-wattage shower of the xi Herculids because it flashed between Draco and Lyra, but it felt like a grace note to the whole night's odyssey. Somewhere on the Pike after Ludlow, I passed out in the deep-sea luminescence of passing cars and woke up on our joltingly paved streets to Julie London on WHRB. We had set out to '70's J-pop. I had neither a telescope nor a conch and these shadows revolve all the same.