It's dusk here on the bedroom floor where I've been reading the newspaper -- genocide in Guatemala, a blizzard in Boston, and the death penalty in Texas. It's the time of day when people inside think it's dark out, time to turn on a light, but people outside find themselves bathed in a lightly fading sky. Lying back, the light too dim to read by, I see the sticker glow-stars on the ceiling are beginning to come out, at first a milky way of pale yellow blur, then, as the shadows shift around, a newly shining universe above me. How unfamiliar: shoe level. I am almost lost in the sudden dark of my room, wondering how I could have idled here for so long, noticing how the world disguises itself in darkness, as if to remind us of everything that we can't see. The ceiling stars become constellations. An arching cluster over my bed is Lazia, the goddess of sleeping in. The fat star above me becomes Jack, my muse of doing nothing. This mythology comes naturally as breath, the surrounding world dissolving as it might for a sailor alone on deck, his tenth night at sea, the reach of the dark around him.
Nina Riggs