Night

I did not know many things.
I didn’t know the moon threw shadows as starkly as the sun but of trees and buildings and fences and not a person to be seen. I didn’t know the world still made noise, when the night didn’t know that it should be asleep.
I do not know how to turn down the brightness on my laptop so I can better see the night world outside my window.
I didn’t know the moonlight blazed in through open windows while we were sleeping. I didn’t know before now that shutting my eyes meant I saw more, saw a deer munching grass somewhere in the yard.
I didn’t know that leaving the window open meant I heard the strange keening of a coyote in our yard, yelping against the fence. I don’t know whether the coyote was injured or not, or if it took shelter under one of the leafy bushes in our yard. I don’t know whether we’ll find it dead there in the morning.
I didn’t know the night has no sense of time though I suppose the day is just the same in nature. Nothing is rushed, nothing has to happen now, even if you sit at the window in the cold for half an hour hoping to catch a glimpse of the coyote, it doesn’t mean it will happen. You could wait till two, or even three, and the coyote could have limped on to reclaim its pack, warmed and welcomed and feasting on a member of the bumper crop of bunnies we had this year. Even the clouds will not have seemed to change and the light pollution will still glow in the distance, over the horizon of trees, near the naval base where they probably never sleep or open a window to listen to the concrete.
I didn’t know that my eyes had grown used to the dark and I was blinded by the bathroom light, squinting and blinking in the brightness. I felt nocturnal then and the night air warmed me, something I could enter into when I finished my business, still there and still cold and still silently whispering sounds. An owl, a coyote, the poodles from the breeder’s kennels down the road, and the distant distant sound of cars.
When the window is shut and the laptop open, I see only my reflection in the glass and a couple of lights from the neighbors’ houses.
I wonder if the coyote made it. It could have been a fawn, perhaps the lonely one that wanders, always separated but never too far from the other doe with her young twins. Either way, something seems to have been abandoned.

8/10/09