Night Story

Your eyes open.

And the shadows

In the sleeping house

Unfurl themselves,

And bow noiseless down

Before you, a grace

To gild the edges of

Your pathway down the hall.

Outside, the years

Swirl

And gather beneath the oaks,

And wait for the curve

Of your hand to rest

Upon the storm door handle.

An age is ending, 

Tonight.

You move, out into it:

The same warm dark

You found at the foot

Of your parents’ porch;

The same sourceless glow,

Not quite moon or lamplight,

That you found bleeding

From around each edge

And black branch once hung above you.

The streets and the houses are thinning

With each step,

And the fabric

Between what you have known

And what you have glimpsed,

And wondered at,

And guessed.

And now, the fields:

The leaves driven into them,

And the wind,

The outline of the forest edge

Before you

And the years turned to their every second,

And your life a slight Aurora

In the corner of your children’s sky.

Hill-walking at night

Is careful work:

The feet remembering

Steps they have not known.

The starless sky makes that sound:

A ringing wholeness

That calls out and welcomes home.

The tired world sighs,

And in its sighing

Unscrolls traces

You remember knowing, but lost

Like a dream to the morning

In your sea of reachings

And sadnesses.

And now, suddenly, they are here,

Forming before your waking eyes

In the age that is ending in this night,

Among your years that gather, embarrassed

Beneath the trees,

And the humble shadows

That bow and flee from underneath your feet,

Within the dim, but deep and sourceless light – a hand

That leads you on

Into the woods.

Here, at the edge of all things that wait,

And hold themselves blameless

Before the throne of God,

You leave behind all manner of

Flickering, fleeting light:

A screen door standing open in an empty house,

Taking to it the gathering dark of October and its fallen leaves;

Your childhood church,

Its blurry springtime windows and dead pastors;

Your owned and endless miles of thick, steel track lifted up —

Lifted up 

From upon the earth,

Caressed into thin, molten, delicate thread

By the Maker’s hand,

And lovingly cut.