New York City, September 27, 2015

★★★ Thin clouds dulled the light but didn’t shut it off, yet. Clusters of green acorns hung among the oak leaves. The four-year-old’s hoodie, long missing, turned up underneath a heavier jacket on a hanger. The clouds went away and clear sun came, shining right through the lotus-seed paste in a thin slice of moon cake. Then the clouds returned, reinforced, thick and puffy, looking capable of blocking out the moon. The sunset was a glimpse of pink through a gap in the heavy gray. Out in the night, the humid air carried the smell of popcorn from the movie theater. In a narrow gap between buildings, the moon appeared, haloed in a glowing blur. There were more glimpses of sharper white light between leaves on the way into the Park, as balloonplant pods glimmered in the street lamps. Then where the trees parted was the moon, just above the edge of a sheet of cloud, now crisp-featured. The whole eastern sky was bright. The children sat on the bench to give the moon their varied degrees of attention. A horse clopped by, passing from shadow through light, and skateboarders came whirring out of the dark after it. Later on, after the children had been taken home and put in bed, the night felt even more humid than before, maybe warmer. A man sat on a bench outside the Park, sending the fumes of a small cigar along the sidewalk. The clouds over Midtown were reflecting their usual spectacle of trapped electric light. All of the east, wherever the moon or the eclipse of the moon might be, was a uniform dull orange, quite like the color of the lunar surface in earth’s shadow. The sprinklers raised white quills on Sheep Meadow. A stack of unneeded crowd-control barriers chimed dully going by on the tines of a forklift.