extraterrestrial

Last night the moon was full. I was at a birthday party. I stood outside inventing constellations, tracing turtles and sting rays and acrobats across the sky in the chilly July night. Full moons are so bright you can play with shadow puppets on the sand, black shapes against silver. I looked down, wineglass in hand, and saw the ethereal gleam of moonlight through glass: a spear of light piercing the inkblot shadow at the end of my arm, crystalline and bizarre.

They told me, at Victoria Falls, that on a full moon night there is a lunar rainbow - moonlight refracted in the never-ending spray of the falls. Is it monochrome? I suppose it must appear so to human eyes, the cones disabled and the rods calmly transmitting black-and-white. One hundred trillion prisms violently thrown up by the smoke that thunders, splitting the moonlight into its lunar spectrum.

Were we ever constructed to understand these things? Light years, quantum uncertainty, and the universe beyond our bubble of life? Best to stick to shepherds' wisdom, Scorpio and the Southern Cross, the moon as a gem in the shadow of a wineglass.