There are nights I try to make dusk into cloth. You know these nights: they are cold and dry, sky clouded over in a palette of soft grays that turn to eggplant. City light fakes sunset to the west. These nights descend onto the body not unlike a shawl or sweater, not unlike a mother or guardian dressing a child for the chilly commute. I reach my arms straight up to help the night slip onto me. This is where I try magic; I reach up and grip the dusk thinking I can bunch up the stretchy parts at the ends of the sleeves, thinking I can feel the clouds like wool scratch my palms, thinking I can smell the back of the wardrobe in the threads. But instead there is just the melting of snowflakes, fallen from grace, in the warm of my palms. Hold out your hand and I can give you some water.
And then, just when I think I’ve snapped out of it, the illusions come. I am on a hike. In the middle of a field ahead there is, impossibly, an old walnut table hewn with splinters, and on top of that a tea kettle whistling steam without a burner underneath it. I walk up to it and find tea bags lined up on the table in rows and stacks — Solitaire, but with chamomile and mint and turmeric. A mug forms from the snow by my boots and sets itself on the table. I pick chamomile, setting it in the mug, and the rest of the tea bags inflate like little mesh hot air balloons and float away. I take the kettle and as I go to pour the boiling water deer come running and watch, their beady eyes reflecting the few stars that have tacked themselves where the city light does not go. Though the kettle is heavy and hot, no water pours from the spout. Instead there is a river of berries, and not a kind I can eat. The mug has disappeared, the chamomile tea bag laying on the table, dry as good tinder. One of the deer comes and snatches it and they all run off.
Who gets to decide what’s real and what isn’t? You tell me. An answer is up there, maybe, in the dusk, that night shawl. But until I can turn dusk into cloth the whole search is stalled. I do know — you know — that there is a reality to this vignette. Because there is a reality to winter. I am not sure it can be clutched in the hands.
