It’s hearts that get broken, not water, not rivers.
Etel Adnan, Surge (2018).
Night is for sleep. Usually.
The curious, the lonely, the still-awake padding softly from bedroom window, shades
drawn, to kitchen, to backdoor, to loosely-latched garden fence. To join
the buzz and hum that continue, defying false stillness curated indoors, the movement
of ground dwellers, branches and clouds, nocturnal eyes measure the moon’s arc,
comforting circle of embrace, a lie we don’t mind. One of many.
Only fingertips convey truth.
So little is within reach. Not the night sky, not mountains advancing
for a better view, not air breathing bodies sleeping upstairs, not wonder
or unanswerable koans, not salmon throwing themselves against the rushing river.
Water will not gloat or mourn what happens to a single fish, nor what happens
to them all. It has no heart to rejoice or break.
I have such a heart.
Eyes scanning beyond my wingspan, ears straining for voices, fingers finding pulse, kneading
skin, tracing curves, grazing cotton nightshirt toward the hole near the shoulder, worrying
fabric other hands have stitched together. No perforated line where heart chamber meets artery,
finger joins palm, memory arises on the formless screen of consciousness, where we are torn
asunder. I’ve been rent, resewn, thrown back in.
Night is for surrender.
Releasing armament, bravado, endless pursuit of mattering. Everything I sense
began without knowing one day it would be in my line of sight, under my foot,
falling through my fingers, swallowed into my belly, powerless as plankton and krill
and Jonah to the maw that is large enough. Why do we try so hard to remain
in the world, push against currents, look into all we will never touch and claim we belong?