Along The Edge

I’d been to the house before, a couple of years ago, but I didn’t remember where it was and or where I was going. It had been raining or almost raining all day and I would have preferred a ride instead of a walk but if I wanted to get there I had to go right away so I put up my hood and went out into the pale evening.

Up the hill, through the dim, under the dripping trees. Not too many people out: bright kitchens, the curtains closed against the beginning of winter. It rained and didn’t rain as the sun went fully down; it rained and didn’t rain as I stepped along the rushing-guttered streets.

Rain trembling on the ends of my hair and eyelashes, soaking my shoes, coming in close and soft and personal. I got turned around and went down the wrong fern-lined street, peering at the mailboxes and the mossed-over staircases leading to the hidden houses. In my ears was a song about hymns and curses and sailors wrecked at sea as the lights across the harbour filmed over with the gentle mist, the unhurried dark. The shining trees inked out against the cars and woodpiles that were meant to let me know I was still here, in the world, the one having to do with online maps and waterproof jackets and congenial dinners with friends. This way, said the green, come in this way, through the mist and the rain and the dark, push it all off and throw it all away and come this way through the hole in the world. “Still waters,” sang the song, “run deep in me.”

I looked up and out past the trees, watched a car hush along the street. I’d gone too far down the hill and had to walk almost all the way back the way I’d come, up to the house on the side of the hill, along the edge of the night’s quiet cradle.