12 Did this “darkness” disappear on the farm?
Your question intrigues me because it registers the way disappearance implies forgetting.
I remember that our hosts, the farm’s owners, offered us a small studio with a sliding glass door that opened onto a meadow.
I remember a vase of slightly wilted roses sat on the plastic table with four folding chairs.
I remember feeling grateful, despite being overwhelmed by a day of nonstop driving with small children; sinking in to quiet labor of unpacking pajamas and changing a diaper. The older daughter requested a bedtime story about deer.
The son’s lower lip trembled as he asked, “What if that deer was a mommy?”
How does one answer the question behind the question of what it means to be a child, a creature whose language is formed in relation to a caregiver?
I did not know, and do not know. Metaphysics still eludes me.
After the kids fell asleep, I crept out of the room through the sliding glass door. I wanted to be alone, completely alone. What small mammals need from the mother is continuous close attention that smothers the possibility of thinking, responding, and making sense of an experience that isn’t directly related to the needs of one’s children.
Parenting is a state of continuous intersubjectivity without reflection. Restless mothers like me become thieves of time in order to continue existing as a separate creature. And so I stole time (and I continue to steal it) from night, from the hours when the world is distracted by sleep. This stolen time lets me reckon with my own perception of what happens. Maybe writing is a way to justify or clear the air for the desire to rest inside one’s own head: to explore that compelling space crowded by the things that touch us.
That night on the farm, I used this time to stare at the moon and admire its specular, silver light reaching across a meadow, curling around the pecan trees without revealing their limbs or the farm implements tucked beneath them.
Poets love the moon for this—the moon illuminates without exposing. No one keeps our secrets more carefully than the moon. No one returns those secrets to us so tenderly. Secrets returned in tenderness establish a trust between beings that know we can see each other dimly, at best, in slivers and pieces and fragments.
Lunar modes are those that take uncertainty and incompleteness as a given. Our X’s glimmer there, in the light that refuses expository judgment. The poem finds its form in the shadow of the pecan tree, where the darkness we carry meets the darkness that exists without us.
Nothing is whole.
