Night
Night, in here and around me. I feel the cool dampness of city night as I point blindly into the windscreen. My body floats in black ether in the auto. My eyes bob in black bile that is my body floating. My eyes are recessed deep into the gelatinous head causing lolling brown and orange night traces of light passing through the body to be snuffed out before reaching them. These wasted gifts I store close to my mind are the last thing I have dominion over in the night. Yet, is this night when it is of my choosing? What of the inexorable descent of that sun, of the day objects now in shade, sweating? These many conditions of night, many postures of the dark and lost of which this impoverished dwelling inside me is just one. My eyes have roamed so many darkened bowers, given into dim door frames, gazed in error at a new face each night and communicated the notion ‘home’ across the short void to my mind.
They move through the dusky interior passages and chambers. A broad and shallow front hall giving into an open kitchen room with blinded windows on the shorter side, a dim door frame on the facing side ensconcing a deeper darkness indicative of depth. They move through into a long narrow hall lined with closed doors whose only light comes through the chinks in the blinds, through the front hall, and through the doorway. These shades of orange hued grey die in value until my eyes suspended in dark apprehend the trace of a single packet of dusk arcing across the earthly form of a doorknob which I cause to turn.
The night in this chamber of the city is tangible. I see my finger reaching out across to the dewy window as I am drawn continually foreward with (the window). The window is sweepingly convex. I draw my face closer to send the chamber and its pale enclosure into the periphery. The entire panorama of the windscreen is washed in black dew, dappled across the glass and floating in the night air. It is the same night from which I folded my skin and flesh into a void that I am now awash in. Now awash in the humility of the hopelessly adrift. She could only assume that this darkness was a poor fraction of the full night. Her impressions were necessarily fallible having retreated so often and so far into places that were not places and could not even suffer the death of the sun for no sense of light or even error was embedded in a vacuum. She made out black on black silhouettes. Some forms of tree canopies, blossoms, long shadows, shadows even, and depth were erroneously placed in the field of night rather than the dew of the windscreen where they were composed of brilliant black pearled of overlooked and surrendered nocturnal fragments. In the distance, although flattened in the panorama, a clutch of homes with iconic profiles were relieved into the ebony canvas.
