Brackish

Looking out, I see but take no notice that the house lights cast yellow shafts into the blackened yews beneath my windows. From the warmth of my doorway, I hear a scurry, and slight steps fade so I strain to see tonight's invader; I step out. Perceptions shift. Denied my eyes as they adapt, I breathe fog that stops not far from my face and evaporates in the dry December night. Once I dreamt that I could harness the coldness of this light, and the lacy crunch of pocked dirt brittle underfoot, honeycombed with sharpness unseen in sunlight. I collected, in a greyed bouquet, plumes of oatgrass which billowed like sudden ghosts on their broken stems, and held aloft, my standard, my talisman. Tonight, they pit my path with shadowed voids, and, unchecked, softly startle as they loom before me. I could sprain a joint falling by, in those holes dug with moonlight. I lean to the whisper of the reeds as the wind wanders through my backyard marsh. Dwarfed and screened by the tallest of these, once again, it is all new, like it was thirty years ago, and I, Explorer, push into the unseen. I listen for my quarry, lost in the tract before me. In my naivete, I'd capture him, and stroke his silky coat; but I have learned that to bring the outside in kills it. I feel a frugal wisdom in this chill, and pity is a word not uttered or even understood in this unsilent night. I wrap tighter and freeze, tread deeper to seek the secrets of the blue-lit labyrinth, pathed by feet surer and smaller than mine. I know there is a center. There must be. But for now, I turn back.