Nocturna

nocturna, a song, pleasing to the ears, more for its pacing than its phrasing, listening in the dark, or mostly dark, dark everywhere but here, small sphere of light and in it words spreading out, rolling up out of the deep dark valley of the book’s spine, up the brightening ridge, reaching for the warmth, a few minutes in the light before the end of the day and the world of the page turned over and back into the dark again. beneath the bound pages the top of the desk is wrapped in brown leather that would be blood red in better light, but instead in the low light of night, tucked in the corner of a cramped room, broods brown and non-descript. and on the leather and across the paper pages my hands hold borrowed warmth from a cup of tea which sets in the margin of the light, breathing steam up into the amber glow. like the light it keeps me from drifting off into the dream of the darkness, the sirens that carry night and time and solitude down from the mountains and through the town.

in a sphere of light, in an otherwise cold house, longing to cocoon though not to sleep, but to nest, to burrow deep into the heart of something, something slow and pensive. a brooding need to wrap up in a blanket in this cold corner of this silent but for the creaking of this chair beneath me and the floor beneath its stiff legs and the growl of the furnace below in the dark, damp space that in a way is always night. there was a time when for a while I moved too quickly through my days and forgot how to brood, how to enjoy the slowness of a moment, the nocturne of slow breathing and slow living, the way time, like the keys of the piano, white and black, sharp and flat that unravel within the meander of a nocturne, ending just where you knew it would when you heard the first note but needed to remind yourself to be patient, to allow all the notes to methodically emerge from the silences between each clean, crisp piano string singing. too much time in the light, out there, beyond the reach of this small sphere of light in the corner of the still, sleeping house, caused me to hear life racing away, a song with no pacing, a pulse out of control, pumping up the pressure of daily waking and walking into something with presumed importance and weight but without cadence, or shading or reasonable rhythm.

here, seated but journeying back and forth from the light to the margins to the darkness of the rest of the room, the rest of the house, the rest of the town, sky, earth, bundled for traveling in a heavy wool blanket, lulled into nodding a steady, dream-like sway, into the light’s warmth and away, balanced between, on the verge of, blurring boundaries, wanting to not want anything other than this written world shaped of ink and paper valleys and ridges before me, spread open, but intent on drawing me in, yet I am not drawn in, but rather away and if in again, only to allow my eyes to partake in the nocturne alternating the playful interaction of focus and blur, focus and blur until nothing is nothing and here is here.