When the night is a careless mother...

When the night isn’t so lonely;

when the lampshade isn’t the only light on

in the whole world;

when you’re not the only one awake;

when the heat is a gentle breathing upwards into the dark,

a delicious warm breath that cradles you loosely, like an arm;

when the night is a dozing mother,

young and slightly careless in her sleep…

 

When you wake up loosely

in the heat-sweet crook of night’s milk-sour embrace;

when the bluish sap of night stains the air with its must,

with its fusty damp;

when the salt of the night, the night’s motherly sweat stings,

clinging to the back of your tender neck…

when the night is a slightly careless mother

holding you closely, but loose, and heat-drugged;

when the night hums her unconscious lullaby against your ear-drums…

 

When the night is like a young wife who left the window up

to let in the waves of perfume, heady and cloying,

from a bush outside the window

with butter-pat blooms, creamy and fat and oozing,

their perfume, their purring and pulsing feline stink,

seductive, musk, filling the granular night with motherly abandon,

with a sprawled dreaminess,

a foetid, moonlight creaminess…

 

…then, the night is a young wife

exhausted by the surprise of the day,

wrung out by the winding mangle of the day.

When the night holds you softly, loosely, to its rising breast;

when the night shares your dreams, breathes when you breathe,

stirs when you stir,

its dear, blurred nightliness a barely-there embrace,

a barely-discernible, sleep-heavy mother’s face.