A Faint Glow - Oct 12 2026

 

A Faint Glow

Oct 12 2026

These dark mornings 

when the cold lingers

feel like an omen to me.

The sun is shining

somewhere on earth, I’m told,

as if this is encouraging.

It’s zero sum, they say;

just wait

dusk comes late

and spring won’t take long.

As if astronomy

could ease my edginess.

As if I have the patience

to do arithmetic

or wait half a year.

A hand strokes my greying stubble.

The mirror mists, shower sprays

and I stand under it,

head bent

shoulders slumped

until the hot runs out. 

A comb tussles with my hair

and loses,

the length too much for it

snags too gnarly. 

Out of towels, I use the crusty one;

but rubbing hard

feel just as damp

and only half awake.

Did I sleepwalk all night,

take too much Ambien?

Nothing to eat,

so I stumble to the car, but drop the key;

down on my knees

in the dark

sweeping blindly through the grass

I never bothered to cut.

A faint glow

has appeared in the sky

where the sun should be rising.

I glance briefly up

but am either wilfully blind 

or the light means nothing to me;

I see

but simply ignore it.

Another omen,

a solemn promise

like the rainbow after the storm?

Or an ominous sign

that I’m somehow stuck

in this twilight world of neither nor?

Dark mornings all winter. Light affects mood. Darkness can be a metaphor. 

There is talk of permanent Daylight Saving Time. Some jurisdictions have already enacted it. Good for the after-work golfers; not great for kids waiting for the bus or walking to school on fall and winter mornings. (Do they do that anymore?) 

The human brain is primed to both see patterns and infer cause and effect. Is susceptible to both a self-referential solipsism and superstition. Here, a random chain of normal events takes on a greater meaning, reflecting the mood of the writer. 

Who, I hasten to add, is hypothetical: me, but not me! I’m not the man in the poem. I’m highly nocturnal, so only up early if I haven’t been to bed! But the mood this poem evokes isn’t unfamiliar. I suspect, at times, to us all. 

The passive voice in the 4th stanza is intentional. I like the sense of being disembodied, as if his hand was on autopilot and he was either watching half asleep or too flat to care. (Probably both!) Flat and apathetic, if not clinically depressed: he’s unshaved, the laundry isn't done, fridge is empty, and grass uncut. A long shower doesn’t help; he needs drugs to sleep! (Never taken Ambien. But heard lots of horror stories!)

I’m quite pleased with the sequence of ignore, storm, and neither nor that end the last 3 stanzas. I think the rhyme cinches them together and gives a satisfying sense of completion to the poem. I came up with neither nor, then worked backwards. I thought I’d constructed a kind of couplet. Only later did I realize that ignore had been there all along!