Hide and Seek on Full Moon Nights in Malindi

It’s the kind of night that makes me want to be a bat.

Warm and luminous, I feel them trace blindly

above, drunk on fruit must and space. The sky is a beach

across which they glide, ignoring the white pumice

resting in tide-striated clouds freckled faintly with glass.

.

Of course, I am here earthbound with you,

drinking rooibos from a plastic mug in the moon-bleached dark.

Neck arched and ached, I sink upwards into the night,

out beyond the margins of the present and

break surface thirty years away on a beach somewhere

.

outside of Malindi, just South of the Galana river’s

dirty mouth, suddenly sprinting with all the endurance

of a dream. My friends and I splinter across dunes, shoes

long shed as we scatter and tumble in the high noon

of a full moon, feeling every concession of the talc underfoot

.

still warm from the day now dead. We run, breath

ragged with delight as we outpace the distant voice

counting from beyond the casuarina grove. Gradually

we fade from each other to explode into stillness

in the womb of a dune, thunderous crash of distant

.

waves breaking against our ribs. Leaning back against

the sand, soft haunches of that monstrous cat, we  

stifled the terrible thrill of being hunted in silence.

The abrupt solitude always settled like a shock, the pleasure

of being alone sharp and wild. And then, as our hearts

.

slowed and the minutes evolved into epochs,

I always began to understand that I was

now the last person on earth. Or maybe

the very first. In that breathed retraction of time

I knew that if I dared climb the sand and enter again that  

.

open night, I would find a world only yet half-born

and myself newly made in it. Beyond stretched

a ferocious garden waiting to be filled and named

if only I had the courage to see and be seen.

.

But on those nights, who dared look up?

.

We could run forever then, down the snaking miles

of that beach. We ran and we buried ourselves in the

warm shadows, waiting and dreaming of what we might do

if ever we were found.