New Dark Ages

St. Lucy's Day

St. Lucy's Day All I can put my hands on, even my face in the dark window over the sink staring out to the fading yard and inside to the brightening kitchen behind my face, staggers helpless a little sometimes and then is propped up. What's important is to try to notice each thing and then know what stops it falling too far to save. A child could worry about where the yard goes at nightfall. And I'm here worrying about the kitchen glaring behind me, wanting me to fall into the deep end of the part of the night after supper. But unlike a child and unlike mute things as easy to pity as to fear, I know something and have a choice to make. If I fall, I can choose what stops me. History is laughing all the time, shaking the little bridges between itself and islands of freedom, the remote tribes there talking themselves into a frenzy, forgetting the one history lesson that matters. The present is easy. It hangs there like a rough pendant in the shape of a house. You press a door. Everything inside is too small to hurt you, easy to walk around in ideal floor plans—tract house, cloister, brownstone. Even easier to stand at the sink and to consider your options. As the yard fades, is it too late for me to stagger through the window towards the dark house 38 at the fcnceline, which is to say the past, those uneasy rooms? Or better to fall backwards into the deep end of the night ahead? Easy to consider. Like collecting water in a stone basin at the end of a garden, letting time discover its own economy, conduct its own half measures of rescue invisibly as everyone else does. But thought is the bad economy of the helpless who keep thinking. It melts like thin ice in a stone basin, disappearing from all directions into its helpless center, the here and now it cannot enlarge and cannot abandon. There is no saving myself anywhere but in the past or future, no rescue but falling back-wards or forwards, into the yard or into the mixed company of tonight's guests. Whatever stops me falling is my real life. 1 take everything there seriously. The dark house at the fenceline never shrinks. Even as the days shorten into the skittish rites of St. Lucy's Day, it gets bigger, opening its crazy floor plan wider for more things, for people I'd given up hoping to sec together. Impossible to walk around inside there. And sweet, never to be hurt by strangers in so much darkness. The deep end of the night ahead is full of strangers ready to talk into 39 the small hours, rehearsing what may never happen in new words, brighter associations of shadow and real flesh and the blue patterns of a woman's tongue I could touch with my tongue. Impossible to be a ghost there. And sweet, never to hurt anyone twice in one lifetime. So my lifetime gutters between two real lives. If he is honest, anyone can tell you the same thing—at any moment, on any of the little bridges of crisis shaken by history's laughter, anyone knows enough to make the choice he must make between trying to live in the past or the future. And nothing more than trying because the choice comes again and again onto the thin ice we never completely abandon. That's how important the unreal easy life of the present remains in spite of the dangers. If I fall, tonight I fall but one way. The shadow and flesh and tongue of a woman in the next room are not for my life. The night ahead is too fast. Home, which I shall never reach, stands at the fenceline, dark, slow, and filling with days that will not get longer. 40 ...