Notes About The Poem
Moonbeam is a small town in northern ontario. Population: ~1200
The founders called it Moonbeam because they believed they witnessed strange lights in the sky they could not explain.
Close Encounter At Moonbeam
Runway lights cut through the dark like a warning,
and I’m pressed against the barrier, waiting for your silhouette.
Every arrival feels like a gamble — maybe this time it’s you,
the signal I’ve been chasing through static, through years, through everything.
Engines cough out their last breath, doors crack open,
faces spill into the concourse like falling stars.
Then you step through — sharp, certain —
and the whole night snaps into alignment, like the universe finally hit “lock.”
Moonbeam dusk bleeds violet, the town humming its old legend —
founders swearing they saw something in the sky that wasn’t playing by the rules.
A light that didn’t behave, didn’t explain itself, didn’t care to.
A light that made people look up and question the ground they stood on.
We drive toward that myth, the highway humming under us,
your hand on mine like a live wire.
Moonbeam on the sign, Moonbeam in the bones —
a place where strange lights don’t ask permission.
Down at the cottage dock, garden lights flicker like runway markers,
casting fractured halos across the water.
Fog slides in low — not gentle, not nostalgic —
more like a ghost that remembers the years we lost and isn’t done with us yet.
We sit at the edge of the lake, night rising like a tide,
your shoulder against mine, heartbeat syncing with the dark.
Two search lights still turning, scanning the sky for something that feels like truth,
something that feels like us.
Moonbeam goes quiet — too quiet —
fog climbing the dock like it’s claiming territory.
The air shifts, pressure drops,
and even the trees freeze like they’re bracing for impact.
Then it happens.
A shimmer breaks the tree line — faint, then violent —
a light moving with intention, with intelligence, with hunger.
Not a plane. Not a star. Not anything that belongs to this place.
It sweeps the lake like it’s reading us,
bright, restless, alive.
The fog lights up silver, the water becomes a screen,
and suddenly the world feels bigger, stranger, more dangerous.
The light flicks once — twice — then arcs overhead,
mapping something in us, something we didn’t admit out loud.
It circles, then drops a gold pulse across the dock,
and in that flash, everything we thought we understood fractures.
You grab my hand — instinct, shock —
and for a second we’re not two people on a dock.
We’re part of whatever is moving above us,
part of the signal, part of the search.
Then it fades — slow, deliberate —
slipping back into the sky like it has other places to be.
But the charge stays, humming through the boards, through our ribs,
through the space between us that used to be distance.
Your bag waits inside — half-zipped, half-decided —
and the fog curls around your steps like it’s trying to hold you here.
I memorize you in the dock light:
the outline, the tension, the way you look like you’re already halfway gone.
Even after seeing something no one else will believe,
you still have to leave —
Moonbeam shrinking behind you, the lake going still.
We walk the dock like a runway, each solar light a countdown.
Back at the airport, the runway burns white and merciless,
the same path that brought you to me now pulling you away.
You turn once — that look that hits like a blade and a bandage —
and the sky’s secret flickers in my chest again.
Distance isn’t distance anymore.
Not after what we saw.
The search light keeps turning — above us, between us, through us —
even as your plane tears into the night.
The dock goes quiet, but not empty.
Garden lights buzz low, fog drifts like it’s thinking.
Moonbeam hums its strange little frequency,
like it’s replaying the moment on a loop.
Something flickers above the tree line — faint, gray, unresolved.
Not enough to name. Not enough to dismiss.
Just a whisper of the signal,
like the universe is checking in.
Your plane is a distant hum now, carving through the dark,
but the dock lights glow like memory, and the sky holds one last pulse.
It turns once — then dissolves —
but I feel it in my ribs, in my breath, in the part of me that won’t shut off.
The search light is still out there.
Still scanning.
Still choosing.
And I turn with it — quietly — toward whatever comes next.
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