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.
