Night Walk

 

For one who knows there are no answers

to the questions, night can become

a tightrope between day and day.  She, who

made breakfast earlier now each

time slept restively.  He walked his

own nights, wanted it that

way.  Tonight the juniper

were bowed and shaggy with a

load of rain.  Only a few

lights kept him company, and

his pain.  He turned into the back

yard where his feet knew their

own way, and sat down on a seat

he could not see.  Here was a place

where he had put his mark: his last sowed

seed were just now pricking

through the ground, moving a

spill of heavy clod around; his bulbs were

splitting in their secret cells, and he could

feel where path and seat concretely held

the impress of his hand.  It was queer

that he might die before the harvest of a

garden bed, before

a stand of gladiola showed its size and

color for the year.

                         Light was branching from

a towering sky.  “I wondered, for another

night,” he said.  He lifted face to feel a

wind from off the bay; it

passed along the bowed trees; they

let slip their load of fragrant

rain, and while he watched they all

stood tall again.  Tilting, awash and

floating in the sun it was the morning of

the morning of the day—this one.  Once

he had looked for

years but now he knew one day to be so

much that no man needs have two.