The clarity of night

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For a moment everything came clear. I was full and emptied all at once. It might have been love. It might have been joy. It might have been a pang like a blade of star light. But there isn’t one word. There is this instead.

I step down wooden steps in the night time. The wood has been worn up through the gray paint from frequent passing. My feet soon feel the gaps between the bricks on the patio. Weeds grow up green through red rectangles.

But the bricks are not the color of the red tulips, fading, unseen in the dark next to the garage that I scraped and painted white last summer. It was nearly fall then. And green is not simply the color of one leaf.

More of all of this is in my recollection than what I can feel in my mind through the soles of my feet. My eyes have turned upwards to the stars.

The air is heavy with moisture, droplets too minute for my eyes to measure. The Dipper has tumbled over so far overhead that only my skin can feel what has been poured out. The air is clear and moist. Most stars are over water and under foot.

And with only a few more steps, I will be knee deep in peonies. The ground was frozen earth only last week, but the time only makes sense if you could hold it like a tulip.

Now in the night, the blossoms, remembered white, petals thin and fleshy, not like tissue or silk, but tonight they are more like fat, leaf-wrapped blueberries. I can only feel in my memory last year’s uncrushed blooms against my knees.

And then in my mind, walking across the intersection on the other side of Mass street, it might have been at Eighth, a young woman steps lively. We had never met. We never will.

She might have been with someone. She might have just stepped off of the curb onto the pavement. She was hardly even then more than a girl in bright sunlight.

And all that I can recall is that her dark socks - they might have been navy - came up and over her knees. And then that her thin legs were pale bare.

In the morning everything will be different.

A brown bunny will nibble at the green clover. A fuzzy yellow bumble bee will alight on a damp peony bud. The bricks would be cool to the touch – if I touched them. And the sky might be blue with some white.

And I will wonder where everything went and I will long for just one more moment like the moment I remembered so long ago - only last night in the dark when everything came clear - for just a moment.