That night of the thick fog, razor-sharp winds, the sky and ground the same
dull, impenetrable gray, my fingers and toes, cheeks and ears unable
to discern temperature, pain signals tapping an indecipherable morse code,
dots of panic, dashes of resignation. I couldn’t see any way out.
That next day, or so we’re told it was the next day, arrived without notice.
Time is invisible. Moments lack outline, tone, anything to mark when
or where they begin and end. Daylight is supposed to creep in, through any window
or crack. That day, whatever seeped through came without a trace.
Trapped underground in total darkness, the eye cannot distinguish shape, can’t identify
top from bottom, up from down, body from air. Within a few hours, trickling water
becomes conversation, the cave-blind mind compensating for the lack
of sensory input by creating voices and visions no one else will perceive.
Even now, storm passed, life around me returned to its diurnal cycle,
I am awake for only half of it, the other hours spent in a kind of immobility,
my metabolism slow, my body preserving energy as if hibernating
instead of sleeping. So many metaphors for generative dark, the transmutative,
metamorphizing, growth-infused chrysalis of blessed privacy, protected from prying
gaze, from careless feet, from predator and deeply burrowing prey, oh, to have been lost
there. It does this skin-sheathed creature no good to adapt to the constant mineral-rich
drip from ever-descending stalactites, to loam and solidify below, to speak only
to those who cannot come looking for me, photosynthesis-fed, eyes in the cloud.