The moment

Night comes to this

snowy, volcanic land in a rush

of peach and molten reds.

Bjork has sat up

so many nights

like this one.

Her gaze never changes,

never flickers,

or wavers in intensity.

Two long and slender

fingers hold a cigarette

that burns without a care

for itself at all;

the singer is as untense as

a flowering orchid when,

suspended momentarily

in the light of dawn,

it blushes and opens up,

stretching large

and lazily.

She flicks the ash

into the ashtray and slowly reclines,

putting her feet up.

The way the burn lingers

in her mind,

an ocean apart or

long rangy mountains

couldn't deter her

in her mental ambulations.

She was thinking of science,

its swarming dragonflies

abuzz with knowing;

and of religion,

which seemed to her almost

nuclear in its unending

eruption, description

of ecstatic life;

sweltering in her mind.

She inched slowly, cautiously

toward a personal

reconciliation of the two

things.

The lights of the stereo

blink and beckon

her to bed.

She slips into slumber

as softly as

an elephant comes tumbling to the ground,

raising a great cloud of dust

up toward the trees.