I Mistook The (Triplet)

I mistook the moon for a streetlight. It was there, elevated enough to peer over the shoulder of those real that my tired eyes thanked it for illuminating my walk home. Full and robust, no rim of darkness. Most of the month a lover’s hand caresses its face, asks—‘Are you okay?’ because it is warming to be asked if one is okay. Collapsed spider’s webs hung from the trees, dislodged, sticky with evening’s dew. I cannot believe I mistook the moon for a streetlight. How many times I have walked that road one would assume I knew its fixtures by heart, yet still! I mistook the moon for a streetlight.

And in the fissures of mist that blotted night’s sky, there in the distance, I mistook the stadium lights of the sports field for Away In A Manger. They pulled one towards them, as though there was some wonder to be observed in their centre. The crowd could not be heard nor the players’ cries. Between the halogen white and me were a thousand layers of black, overlapping and multiplied, jagged foliage shedding its clothes. Cold draughts peeled off the window onto my soft hand as I reached blind for the cord. A perfect gradient licked the chest of twilight. Unseen, the players passed and shot. Shuttered away.

I mistook the falling leaves for confetti. You would too if you felt as romantic in autumn. True confetti falls not straight down but courses diagonally through the air. Just as there is not a single confetti, but a piece of confetti – as if it exists only as a collective – so there is not a single falling leaf, but always plural. The confetti fell from the beech outside Postman’s Park where the wedding of Aldersgate Street and St Martin’s Le Grand took place, at the foot of the Presbyterian Church, the fruitful marriage moving along into a pregnant belly of widened road, so grey and so blunt, like so much of London.