April 18: Security Light by Nancy Pulley

Security Light

I sit beside that mist-breathing pond,
that moon-filled pond, that pond
with fishes slapping water, and encounter
the part of me that is drowning, that lies below
the shivering surface, sometimes makes
its crazy belly flop of a leap
into the great open sky. Now there is a light,
a slick of brightness oozing
over waters, crowding out the moon.

Night is a place for imagining,
where each thought bubbles up big and sonorous
as a bullfrog’s call. I am afraid
of all things mysterious being found out,
lit up at the wrong moment, dumb
and transfixed in our relentless safety lights.
We need the night, the soft muttering
of ducks returning home
to some unseen inlet, the putting away
of our day beneath a cloak of black feathers.

 —Nancy Pulley (Bartholomew County)

 This poem was originally published in Hopewell Review.  Nancy Pulley lives and writes in Ogilville, Indiana. Her poems have appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Indiannual, Flying Island, Arts Indiana Literary Supplement, Passages North, Plainsong, The Sycamore Review, and the Humpback Barn Festival collection. In 1992, she won the Writer’s Center Poetry Chapbook contest, resulting in the publication of a chapbook, Tremolo of Light.