I remember last year when we were lying together on her rooftop
and I was overwhelmingly grateful for the cover of night.
In silence we watched cigarette smoke
dance away and dissipate in the air and, God,
the gentle wisps were nothing short of beautiful.
Like heaven and earth, stars and nicotine mixed before our very eyes.

Dawn crept up and jumped out at us and our eyes
burned in protest of our consciousness. The rooftop
shingles felt like sandpaper, an almost laughable paradox to your beautiful,
impossibly soft hands. I studied your blue branch veins, streaks of night
against your pale day flesh. But suddenly God
was absent and in his place came fog like smoke—

not the kind on little cat feet, but the smoke
and mirrors kind that appeared suddenly and of which our weak unseeing eyes
could not trace the origin. I'd bet anything that God
was out there somewhere laughing as we blindly stumbled off the rooftop,
a feat that ironically would have been much easier at night
(at least it was clear then) and the fog was sad and not at all beautiful

and I hated it. We tumbled through the window of her bedroom in a beautiful
heap of tangled limbs and sighs of relief but the fog-smoke
was not done with us yet. It snaked around our bodies, erasing the night
prior from our memories. Our shoulders tensed and we averted our eyes—
the ceiling, floor, anywhere, anywhere but you. The rooftop
pined for us. Its creaking made us nervous, so we went outside to look for God.

We found the night's remnants: cigarette butts and regret. We didn't find God,
though, did we? We found emptiness and estrangement, nothing beautiful
to fall back on. And still pining was the rooftop,
its tears spilling out the downspout, being tainted by the smoke
from our fresh cigarettes. The fog was gone, though, and our eyes
could not be shielded from the harsh winter day. The previous night

was left still forgotten because it would not be fair to compare crisp night
atmospheres to stark day ones where God
was nowhere to be seen. Because surely he was not in the angry sun that pierced our eyes
and reduced our vision to tears and undeservedly beautiful
bursts of color that plagued our retinas. Maybe he was in the smoke
still steadily rising from our lungs, since it went up to blanket the rooftop.

And who would have blamed him? The shingles are the night is the beautiful.
And God is the clarity is the smoke.
It's all irrelevant, though. Our eyes are closed now, and there is no rooftop.