Ruminations of Night

We would be together and have our books and at night 

be warm in bed together with the windows open 

and the stars bright.

-Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 

 ---

Still.  
Like a windless summer, like a fallen grove of giant sequoias.  
Full of grace.  
Like a quill feather dipped in ink, sweeping across loose leaf with perfect tension,
depositing a trail of ruminations.

Night,
Comfort me.  

Folded into the thin and fragrant air, you linger like the unhurried steps of an elder's stroll.  A hunter, a collector, a cello player.  Your nocturne, a blend of haunting and stirring, returns every hour--dallying through the beaten cobblestone roads, slipping into sleeping gardens, and convening under forgotten fire escapes.  I look up at the gradations of the evening sky from a far place; the distance, which I can feel, moves me.  Then, it is dispelled as the subtle colors converge to an overwhelming oneness, as the magic of dusk and alchemy unfolds.  

The smokey wafts of dinner simmering on stove tops; the tinkling of silverware being laid out; the shrilly whistling of a new harmonica on the lips of a charmed child.  The dark of twelve hours.  Unfettered, I spill myself across you, over you, into you, within you.  Unseen, noiseless.  You reach for my secrets: unmet desires, unspoken thoughts, untold anguishes, and undelivered confessions.  We watch each other.  You peer in through my glass windows as I look out into your ebony mass.  Endless, rich ebony mass.  I stare at the compass of resplendent dots that steer the helms of wandering ships, and something inside me burns.  It burns, then it hurts.  I can feel it.  Those pangs.  An unobtrusive pale light falls onto my limbs, which are tendered with scars--deflecting the reasons they are there and, instead, making them worthy emblems of their carrier.

Untruths have become ruminations that sound too loudly, too heavily, against a motionless shell.  The salt of the darkened ocean rubs against these sheets of no-longer white.  I taste it on my matted hair strands.  They are damp, and I cannot comb out the knots.  I come to you, I stand at this bedside window, I wait in the comfort of your presence. 

Still.  
Like a windless summer, like a fallen grove of giant sequoias.  

Night.
You are home to me.