October 5, 2012

It's so dark this morning, even the spill of light from the window is lost before it reaches the trees.  I'm not sure what makes some mornings seem so dark, a trick of the weather or the dark.  A flock of tiny moths are beating at the screen, their soft wings fluttering, the edges looking ragged with use.  They are lucky the geckos see to be somewhere else.  When there is so much dark, the road is a faint orange curve, flat and thin, looking improbable though the white headlights of a rumbling truck seem to believe in it.

Do you wake sometimes not feeling settled in your skin?  Tenuous and waiting to become solid . . . I'm having a morning like that.  Where I put my foot down and half expect it not to make contact with the floor.  Where I sit at the desk and my mind just floats close to my skin like air on my face but refuses to become a breath.  Suddenly I inhale a long shuddering yawn, as if what I feel is a hunger for air, or substance.

My Weather

Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious,

restless, stunned, relieved.

Does a tree also?

A mountain?

A cup holds

sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.

I hold these.

Jane Hirshfield

I think this morning I am looking for the three large rabbit-breaths of air, and what I hold is too uncertain to be cataloged.  Waiting to see something besides a thin road and dark, I hunker down and just breath and write, unsure of where words might live, trees or mountains, dark or beyond that.  Now, following my husband's waking, there is news of the day, traffic reports, and weather.  And I begin to settle in, begin to realize minutes are evaporating and, substantial or not, I have to start all those things that begin the day, knowing I will fall into all those little routines and be comforted.