#SOL17: Birds Sung to Me

Night, I (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

"On starless nights, one can feel like a loose array of limbs and purpose, and seem smaller, limited to what one can touch."   ― from Diane Ackerman's  "Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day"

I. 

It was time to let go of our house where light fell through familiar windows and each creak of the staircase I knew by heart. It was time to pack away all that could not be carried further. Such cargo weighed too much and I carried it too far. Some truths took greater time to surface. Sea deep. They resided where sunlight did not penetrate. Oceanographers called this the bathypekagic zone. Poets knew it as the midnight zone. I, like every other widow, simply called it the blue-black absence of love. 

Across the last two years, grief remained a spiraling affair.  At times a darkness rose up to reclaim and then release me. Claimed and released over and over and somehow each time the sudden pain of it stunned me. The center I once knew by heart was blown wide open after Rob died making it hard to find my balance in the dark.

II.

And yet, I stood 
          at the open window tonight
                               where the fall of late light
                               felt familiar,
                                      memories remained bittersweet,
                                       and the sharp desire to be still
                                       pressed against a need to move.  
                                       
Grief was a tension
that rose between then and next
leaving me only a slim truth:
Rob was dead and I was not.

Outside the window
           a pair of cardinals settled
                      on the limb of a bare tree
                 just beyond my reach
                 and sung to me.

As I listened even the darkness felt warm.

#SOL17: Out of Darkness

Winter Solstice (M.A. Reilly, 12.21.10, 3:05 a.m._

The Coming of Light 

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

                - Mark Strand 

                

I. 

I had planned to stay up to shoot the lunar eclipse. What I did not know was that my husband had planned to join me. I thought he had gone off to bed. He had not and as we stood outside at 2:30 a.m. in the freezing cold of late December--we each felt so very much alive.  

This is mostly how we lived.


II.

Closer to 3 a.m. we agreed that Devon, who at the time was ten-years-old, should see the eclipse too, witness the Blood Moon. A total lunar eclipse on the Winter solstice. I waited outside with the tripod and my camera as the darkness continued to gather. Rob went inside to rouse Devon. A few minutes later they both came outside bundled up. Devon drowsy and leaning his slight body into his father's.

We stood there in wonder. None of us talking as the moon turned red.


III.

The next day, I showed both of them the image I made from that night. 

What caused it to be red? Devon asked. 

And Rob, equally as comfortable as scientist as he was poet, launched into an explanation about the Earth's atmosphere and scattered light.


IV.

In the year following Rob's death, what I have mostly learned, 
          mostly remembered 
          from living with this man, 
                      making a family with him 
     
         is that it is 
         so often 
         about the coming of light. 


V. 

We created love together out of darkness.