There’s always something about the dead of the night that inspires quiet thoughts. I look out my the windows in my room and wonder what peddler of the low and the mean walks the streets tonight. Maybe money changes hands, maybe it slips past sheets, and purchases are made.
You can feel the quality of the night decay, melting in the wash of starlight and moonlight, no more excitement or passion, but a stillness instead decends on everything. If you ignore the creaking bugs that form that tableau, you can almost feel the breath in your lungs pause with the darkness. Floodlights in the distance ply the skies, waving this way and that, a synchronized dance iterated again and again, but no one watches. Even those lights are still.
It still bears a sense of decorum. The absence of light hides many things; not horrible, not fearful, not mundane.
Perhaps two people beneath sheets, moving in time to each other’s heartbeats, hear nothing but each other’s receding breaths. Maybe that silent unconscious speech speaks more eloquently of love than any poet could.
Rows of houses line up in procession like tabletops in a restaurant, covered in night-dark tiles like tophats, bowed and silent. The powerlines string between and disappear into each rooftop; the liquid black obscures the rigorous boundaries with which we follow as points of reference. The scene, at night, becomes a fluid shadow hinting of matter beneath.
I’ve known friends who could live in that formless dark. They say they can, and some even do; in the night even the rose must remain without its trappings of beauty.
