All at Once - April 30 2026

 

All at Once

April 30 2026

Dusk comes slowly

then all at once.

Light lingers

after the sun has set,

spreading through the atmosphere

and around the curve of earth.

As if it could be captured by air

and kept indefinitely

so darkness never comes;

a perennial dusk

of phantasmagoric light.

Incorruptible photons

that have travelled millions of miles 

reflecting off molecules

like light from silvered glass.

As if you stood between two mirrors

and saw your image recede

until infinity swallowed you up.

How small can you get

how long can you last

until vanishing

into its two dimensional labyrinth?

But night does come,

lit by the stars

and softened by the city lights.

So it never gets truly dark

out in the real world.

Except here

in this windowless space 

between four walls.

Where even a glimpse of sky 

is impossible

and there is no dawn or dusk,

no sense

of the passage of time

or when the dark will end.

Where night comes all at once

then stays;

bearing down on you

like a heavy weight

you haven’t the strength to budge.

This poem took itself in an unexpected direction. As if it had a mind of its own. 

Which isn’t surprising, since my process is generally to begin with an image or thought, have no particular expectation or preconceived ending, and then just riff. It can feel like taking dictation: the sound suggests a word, an idea offers itself, I let a tangent deflect me, or a phrase appears. Here, I began with looking up and watching dusk descend through the picture window, after which Hemingway’s famous quote from The Sun Also Rises came to me:  “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” It doesn’t darken at a steady rate. You don’t notice dusk settling in, until you do.

At some point, a theme hardens and the path ahead narrows. Here, I was playing around with darkness and light, with the night sky and the elusiveness of total darkness. So I figured human light pollution (another environmentally themed poem!) would be the direction it took. I can’t explain in any autobiographical way how the poem instead became a metaphor for depression, or at least for despair.

I suspect this came less from personal experience and more from process: the image of vanishing into a mirror, which led to the less literal thought of feeling so small you disappear. Which is as good a metaphor for depression as any.  But that wasn’t intentional; it came from simply wanting an example of molecules reflecting light. After all, isn’t the cardinal rule of poetry to show, not tell?

Not that there aren’t many reasons to despair in this time of dizzying geopolitical change, inequality, runaway climate change, and execrable leadership. (Not to mention the equally execrable followership that permits it to happen.)