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The moon gathers her skirts in layers. Golden silk that floats wide and light. As airy as a French meringue. As gossamer as freedom and as easy to snag. As warm as the false summer that rustles the rattling brown oaks at the dipping of the year. The sky around her is blue velvet with a golden trim as she begins her climb.
A cloak that the moon sheds when she has climbed a few feet above the outline of mountains. A flash of heat has her sweating. That and the climb.
She's an hour late. Or is it early? Difficult to tell when time can be wound back and forth like a creaking gear. Like water flowing into a bamboo stock to dip forward with a thump of a thumb. Like a candle burning down to the next mark with a fan next to it. Scattering wax. When the sun's last rattle of rays leave his dial to darkness.
She's on time. She is a lunar mark of a calendar ever marching forward.
The emperor without clothes calls up from the wreckage of his rental house in a tidewater. "If you take off your skirt, I'll take off my most beautiful coat. Really the best coat ever woven. Worth five of your skirts." He chuckles and wanders in some sort of circle with no center in the asbestos debris.
The moon shakes her head and her silvering locks bounce. The emperor is already naked.
That's not why she strips off her golden skirts to drift as a golden cloud to rain what gold coins she can on the hungry.
The emperor is naked and losing what mind he once had. Why should she listen to him?
No, she listens to the sound of a million voices from a dense city shout their cheers to the night and lets them carry her. Gives them what light she can as she climbs high.
The sky is black now. Satin and sparkled with the occasional star. In her youth, the Milky Way was the moon's wrap, but the city lights are too bright, and she has too many hot flashes to need it.
She's smaller now. Sleek in silver pants and running shirt, racing across the arc of the sky.
There's a bear, her bear, brown and shaggy and strong, roaring in the high mountains. In the rich valley. In the delta bay where the rivers flow sluggishly into the golden narrows to sea and further yet. In the city where angels sleep.
Mist gathers around her a wonderfully cool blanket that makes her weary limbs seem wide again as she climbs down carefully along the edge of the sky to snuggle with her shaggy bear. She does not want to fall.
She won't. The sky tinges with a delicate pink, and the sundial wonders if it will re-find purpose.
The moon is not looking. She's snuggling down to a nap with a bear.