Awesome Nights

The Milky Way from out back of Aunt Anna’s house in Pittsfield, the Berkshires, at night, the broadest swath ever seen by me anywhere including at night out in Montauk, how dark it is supposed to be there on the South Fork, the extreme East End; Via Lactae, as the Romans called it, the Milky Way, a squirt from Hera’s tit, as my Dad had told me how many years ago, having brought the telescope that Mom and he had bought for me with us, in the summer, vacationing as we would, I would longer, at Aunt Anna’s, the older sister of my mother’s mother. Awe. I understood then what awe was–real awe.