After midnight

the light in here
is as faint
as that of ten thousand long-spent galaxies
with a trillion worlds
in these almost empty reaches of space,
where the sparse and the glacial prevail,
and the houses simmer on
along the surface layers,
their windows turned inward

The Norrbotten night light
in Noret's eastern July
is a finely sifting powder
barely felt upon the skin,
and almost gone
the moment it is sensed,
like flickering moments of fertilization
along species-rich roadside ditches,
while the seconds pass on stilts
out on the country road

Perhaps I do not exist,
yet I hear the freezer downstairs in the kitchen
humming
like a swarm of bumblebee Brahmins
with luxuriant secrets
in the suffocating biomass
of high-summer greenery,
where I have walked barefoot
in the intense contentment of everything,
in warmth and moisture,
in organic life's best chance

Inside the greenhouse,
the tomato jungle erupts,
kindly yet firmly,
around whoever dares enter,
so tightly entwined
by the greenery –

which knows exactly what it wants