NIGHT AND OTHER THOUGHTS
Dark shapes itself against the light. Night is the spare, the scant, the absent. The undoing of light,
of the seen, of the obvious. It’s an occlusion, a quiet shutting down of doing, of making, of being visible. There’s the quieting, the turning inward, then an opening to a portal where we surrender to strangeness. A turn toward wishes, or fears, the dark is still the good of it. Wrapped up in the dark, night pulls us into another river of what we know. Something larger. More than we can be in light. Missing stars are brighter in my dreams. Where I only see them now.
Enveloped in my blankets and pillows I embrace my night home like a lover. Or is it the feeling of an infant asleep on my chest at dusk, enclosed in our breathing, inhaling and exhaling as a single breath? But all my lovers are gone, and the infants in my life live a long ways away. So I comfort myself with this other love, the home my bed is, where everyone is far away and I am alone in my sweet comfort. With only the words in my head singing me songs about what was and is.
I dream in stars now. I’m starting down the crumbling lightless road–gramma’s farm—afraid in the murky dark. I can’t see far ahead. When I look up, night opens to a vast horizonless sky: The vaulted heavens are filled with an ocean of stars. “Wait,” I call to the one down the road. “the stars . . .” Laying myself down on the broken road, I fill myself up with the all the stars there are. Ecstatic, just as in all my recent star dreams—I know this time it’s not a dream. Lightless night has conferred this gift–my missing, my mourned for starry nights.
I put my lemon tree in the path of the full moon last night. It seems a good thing to do just now. We could use an improbable marvel—say a new kind of photosynthesis emerging between leaves, water and the moon. I went to bed where my blinds were drawn to read about worldwide disasters so I couldn’t see the moon beginning to go down over the Hudson just behind where the new luxury 42 story condo will soon occupy the neo-gothic quad of Union Theological. But I knew I had left the moonlight pouring in through my door.
Joanna Clapps Herman has had 43 poems, micro fiction, essays and stories published since 2020: in Odyssey PM, MUTHA, Pummerola, The Ocean State Review, Italian Americana, Persimmon Tree, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Short Beasts, Alice Says . . . , Storied-Stuff, Subnivean, Ovunque Siamo. Her book length publications include, When I am Italian: Quando sono italiana, exploring the question of whether it’s possible to be Italian if you weren’t born in Italy, No Longer and Not Yet and The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America. She has co-edited two anthologies; Wild Dreams and Our Roots Are Deep with Passion.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 