Reading into Dusk

‘The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.” —George Eliot 

On the wood porch I awake 
to no sound, but a sense of some change: 
light falls across an arm and 
I pull back into darkness. 
Lying there, only the paper birch 
visible in the yard, I watch 
our eighteen-year-old near the window. 
He doesn’t see me: his eyes focus 
on something closer—reflection, perhaps. . 
his hand goes up to tidy his hair. 
He looks flattened by light. 

Distance becomes farther in that moment, 
and some verge of unwelcome knowledge 
intermits, like that separateness of being 
as when a child I passed the Olson house 
after dark—no coverings 
on any windows. Afraid to pause, 
to be seen seeing, I felt out-of-the-world 
on a course that couldn’t veer home.

Silence enlarges the night yard. 
Glare from the windows turns exclusive, 
the medium of solitude gone blank, 

inconsolable, that small space 
between myself and the boy in the kitchen 
anesthetic and painful at once, 
as if nothing will matter 
to the reach of a voice.