Writing in the Dark

Moorhead, MN. 44F. Rain (48).

Wordle: primp.

“To drive without destination is to accept your own fragility, the passage of time, with the miles ticking off the pace of your own mortality. Moving through the country you are moment by moment capable of topographically mapping your past, and more capable of a clear view of your future. This is as close as you’re ever going to get to the life of a freewheeling migratory bird.” Jim Harrison

I woke before Cathy for once, or should I be more exact and say I tossed myself out of bed first, since I often wake before she does but stay in bed scribbling or reading my Kindle or listening to an audiobook or checking email or otherwise bringing my consciousness by degrees into the workaday world. She had already prepared the two coffee pots (one decaf, for me) last night; all I had to do with plug one in and hit the switch on the other.

I checked the mouse traps. This is the season when they migrate from the field into the house. We caught one, again, at the top of the stairs to the basement. Which raises a question: do they stop to take the bait on the way up or the way down? If I had to guess, I would say the latter, though it’s also possible for one in the basement with a good nose to smell the black, liquid bait I use.

At any rate, I showered and shaved and brushed my teeth with my new electric brush and dressed before using a plastic claw device to pick up the mouse, trap and all, and toss it, with a small prayer, into the trash bin outside. (No prayer, actually, just the thought that such a trap is more humane than glue traps or poison, which might contaminate the food chain and harm a larger animal after it snacks on a very tasty mouse, though this one appeared scant and not plump. Clearly, it didn’t have time to primp before its life concluded. Mortality in action.) I reset the traps, though to do so I had to go out to the car, because yesterday we bought more of them at Home Depot (or was it Lowe’s?) and we forgot the bag in the car. (It was the penny sale, two for one bottles of wine, at Happy Harry’s liquor store, and you would be right to guess that we didn’t forgot to bring the case we purchased inside.) I opened the garage by habit before realizing that we hadn’t bothered to put the Subaru in the garage because a freeze wasn’t forecast last night. (And, in fact, it’s 42F and drizzly.)

By this time Cathy was settled cozy into her nest on the couch in the fireplace room and so I made myself at home in my easy chair with its footstool, my laptop, and an insulated mug of decaf along with a tumbler of water. It’s quiet in the house and I like it that way. I’m pleased Cathy doesn’t feel the need to turn on the tv or ask Alexa to play music through the Echo Studio speaker I’ve set up in front of the tv so that it can do double duty as a sound bar. (To those who might consider the same: usually it works fine, but sometimes it’s out of sync with what’s on the tv, a consequence, perhaps, of setting it up wirelessly instead of plugging it in. The sync problem is especially acute with Amazon Prime whenever we try to watch an older movie; it’s impossible to do so, even though the streaming service, speaker and Fire Stick remote are all Amazon devices and should work together. Go figure.)

That was a long aside. Let’s start a new paragraph for the sake of eye ease.

I dreamed, I remember, but my conscious mind can’t fetch imagery or dialog. Nothing Freudian about it. I do like to remember what I dream, though, so it’s a minor frustration. The poet Denise Levertov once wrote about the need to have pen and paper on one’s bedside table. Any morning that I rise remembering that I dreamed but incapable of recalling what I dreamed, this poem comes to mind:

Writing In the Dark

It’s not difficult
Anyway it’s necessary.
Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.

Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.

You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen — ballpoints don’t always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are your tools.

Never mind about crossing your t’s, dotting your i’s -
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.

Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices.

or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:

words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.

Denise Levertov (10/24/23–12/20/97)
Photo from teifidancer: RANDOM THOUGHTS IN A DIGITAL AGE