Come dark, we’ll let the maple water cool in the pot, sugar it down to syrup in the morning. Go hang your lake-wet things from the rafter and pull on your nightdress, your brother his pants with frogs on them. Your hot head eased down like a sunfish back into water. You ask again for a nightlight, afraid of the dark. It is spring, the light is late. We want to take you both by canoe to sleep by the river, you the daughter and son of my love and his first wife. Smooth stones, the boxwoods. The cypress and green ash, and there your tent—picture it. The light is late but not forever, you protest, eventually the darkness will fall. But, I say, the dark settles like the feathers of a great bird. Let’s go by boat to camp where you can hear the river all night though you do not see it. Though I am not your mother, I will be there.
—The light is late but not forever.
But you have lived the day in lion form, in a dress handed down. And see? See how the dark comes through the window screens to cool our heads and bellies in your father’s household as we dream atop our beds. And see how only the dark unfolds the luna moth like a letter green-furred, little halogen far-come-near to your bedside reading lamp.
—The light is late but not forever.
But we will build a driftwood fire, and when the embers cool to nothing, we’ll switch on our headlamps, slip into our tents to glow them into globe lanterns. Then, lights out, you will hear the dark’s feathers settling at last. Tailfeathers curled and dusty, each shaft tucked into shaft then fanned to cool. The moon not yet risen. If only you can come to love it—
Once, I also feared the dark. The lamp snuffed, I feared the bat’s wing brushing, the immense unknown swallowing my small knowable lit sphere. In my twenties, I read the German poet Rilke, who composed the first poems of his Book of Hours also in his twenties, writing, all nerves and music, at the turn of a new century now old. He wrote them near Berlin, quick and intense, in the morning and evening, these inner dictations, he called them, written like a breviary. With such poems unspooling around him, he wrote in his journal in November 1899: I have begun my life. Here, the dark is fruit, is possibility. You, darkness, of whom I am born, he writes. I love you more than the flame/ that limits the world/ to the circle it illumines/ and excludes all the rest. True, the light makes certain what wing or whatever brushes by. Yet it is not certainty we crave but softness. And embrace: the dark embraces everything…lets me imagine/ a great presence stirring beside me. I prayed his breviary, I switched off the light, my mind hummed. You, darkness, I said. I clear a table for you. I drink to you, the anise-burn in my throat—here, a carafe of wine and a plate of bread. I open my screenless window to bats or whatever.
once, in the dark, village women took the Orthodox icons from the slate-roof churches and hid them from this empire and that, under beds and in cellars, in the dung heap. In the folds of their dresses until the fires passed. I can tell you I saw the salvaged. I went to Greece to see what the darkness had protected, walked the road lined in oleander to the inland village of Theologos on the island of Thassos in the North Aegean Sea. I climbed the path to the stone and tile church of Agia Paraskevi, its clock tower plastered white, and, inside: the gathered icons long hidden under beds and among root vegetables and buried—those archangels and saints women had hidden under their housedresses.
One icon was set apart: Virgin & Child pre-Byzantine, made of wax and mastic in the sixth century, the priest told me, by the Apostle Luke, asking to be touched now, the deep lines in her headscarf ridged and raised like braille. I could imagine the Virgin’s headscarf a nimbus glowing secret under crinoline. Some brave village girl whose heart did not stutter, did not hesitate as she swiped the raised waxen faces from their frame and fled, tucked them into horsehair skirts, safe sheaves of night. Climbed the hill, loving her own pulse, her own breath, knowing by feel the grove of trees in the dark. She settled her dress like feathers around her, whispering the secret she knew of the Holy One—Darkness is not dark to you, just another shade of star.
Let me tell you another story: Once, walking back from the church of stone and tile to the small blue house I was sleeping in near the sea, I saw an old man bring his TV out to the night porch for the soccer match. Shirtless, white tuft of hair in the glow. Mexico scored on Germany, the underdog victor, and he cheered like crazy then switched off the TV and sat in the dark for a long while. Somehow, I could sense his life come up in his throat, the goal he scored for his school, the girl, the motorbike, the country poor for growing things but a hydrangea bed for her. Cooled in the sweet dark remembering. He sat there long after I entered my rented house.
One night, you will pack your small duffel, glimpse the crescent moon through the hung wet things, follow the road lined in oleander, led by moonlight then by nothing. The bat will want only to kiss you and pass. You will be lonely. The goats, once you leave the road for their path, will yield to you. Your heart like a country poor for growing things and then, one day—young olive groves and fig.
In the dark sea under a dark sky you’ll not braid your hair, nor even tie it, and how it will spread like inky wings in seawater. If only you can come to love it—
In the dark, someone will leave pears by your door. We hope to take you by boat. It is spring. In the middle of the night maybe I will slip out of the tent I share with your father and find you sitting on the bank, listening to the river rapid you do not see. And though I am not your mother, I’ll picture you years from now, sitting facing the sea as the goat bells start up in the night, your hair sea-wet. I’ll not be there then, nor your father, nor your mother. But all of us will trust you to the embrace of the dark. Those pears, a few apricots—you will find them come light.
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From Yoke & Feather by Jessie van Eerden. Used with permission of the publisher, Dzanc Books.