What the Moon saw tonight

You left a souvenir, a memento, impressed on my skin, on time’s trembling trace ingressing, a transition, a threshold, between here and there, now and then, in this middle of between that comes upon me mid-night. No, not at midnight. The midnight is a calculated point of chronological time, scientifically measured to absurd perfection. But mid-night, sometime over the duration when darkness wears me like a silly trinket and moon brings his gifts, mid-night could be anytime between now and then, depending how one feels the dark, what rhythms carry the body through this dreamy threshold.

The night, night herself, cradles my sleep, my gestation, my benevolent slumber, a time when the body remembers. Night becomes a fertile region of gentle swelling of timid, restful acquiescence to Earth’s gravity, veiled in gossamer shadows that deepen the texture of something unfurling, a soporific interlude, when the desire is always for the potential, even if not probable, contact.

The night summons the palpable, the manifest, words address me, undress me in my sleep, remove satin and silk, unknot the liveried corset’s breathless grip, dismantle the banal accoutrements of daily appearances, disrobe the frilly frock of obedience and cradle me bare, unprotected, trembling. And a strange calmness comes over me mid-night, I wear the darkest dress of eyelids shut, the silvery slippers that the moon so perplexly stitched upon my feet. This is the time of deepest depth, of the widest crevasse between two lips of the same gorge. 

The time passing.

I am a woman writing within the threshold of the moment, imperceivable by the naked eye (when was it clothed? What was it wearing? Was it cross-dressing? In between a dress and a pair of jeans, did it catch itself naked, seeing with its whole self the time passing?). In the bereft twilight I loose myself before being abandoned. I surrender to the swelling membrane between now and the ambiguous, mid-night.

The supple unknown. 

I cannot be certain of the direction until it occurs. It occurs to me sustained, sparsely. And I let my thoughts run away with words, silent escape, as if approaching the end of a storm, to catch a last gust of wind upon which to sail with buccaneers, drunken philistines, abominable academics. A supple clearing, a chance opening, veils part, I’m making way, I stand clear, I swell, joining, not enclosed, but cleaving, as my bones (those stubborn vertical articulators), as my bones wish, as they wish, as they happen to dance, on a moonlit night.