Zoles

Looking at the stars 

is something everyone does
at various times
in their lives. I was
doing it one evening in
Denver, standing in
a field. My sister
was there, with her boyfriend, Rob,
and a small brown-haired
girl – one of those sort
of androgynous females
in baggy clothes – with
earnest eyes.
                     She said
she was scanning for “zoles.” “Zoles,”
I think, were either
alien space ships,
or living things unknown to
science – like angels
maybe, or souls. You
could tell zoles from stars by their
slow, blinking movement
and blue color. I
wanted to see them myself.
Even now sometimes,
when I have a “Z”
in Scrabble, I hopefully
look up “zole,” but it’s
never there.
                    I doubt
if that girl saw zoles that night.
But whenever I
look up into the
twinkling sky, as I sometimes
do, I look for them.