Wake early enough
And you will see me
There
At the outer edge
The fringe
The horizon
That light gently slipping in
From under the earth’s curve
Having steadily traveled all night
To reach you
The pigment seeping in
The foreground coming into focus
Once the bustle begins it’s easy to overlook
My unbroken blending
A day can appear as a one long length of light
Ending in darkness
But I am here all along
In the shadows that gradually stretch
And shift
In the steady arc of the sun
Don’t you see?
A day, a dawn
is not one moment you can point to
Twilight is not a cleaver
separating night from day
It is a movement
God separated the light from the darkness
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night
And
there was evening and there was morning
And there was everything in between
Here is a self portrait:
I am every place earth melds into water
Every place water saturates earth
Every place the two become indistinct
As anything other than a whole function
Call me a tidal zone
A mangrove
A river overflowing its banks
Call me an estuary
The groundwater
A wetland teeming with life
I am water made solid
A glacier slowly carving
A landscape that is never static
I am water taking to the air
As a fog bank
As a storm
Here I am, the sky in our lungs
The ocean in every cell of our bodies
I am every body
Not entirely or neatly bounded
Every assemblage of beings who have tangled
to become a happening
The fungal hyphae meshed in the roots
Defining planthood as rightly as leaves
The whole choir of microbiota gathered
To compose your body
Light and dark
Day and night
Sky and sea
Sea and land
Who of this world can say
These are not continuums?
Go
Go grab your coat
Come down to the marsh at twilight
The red-winged blackbirds will be coming home
To their nests of grass and mud
The frogs with shrinking tails
Will be singing full-throated
Come
Sink your feet into the silky mud
Watch the light slip
and then tell me
That what is not clearly this or that
Is not real
That what is in transition
Is not natural
Better yet, tell the frogs
Who were just yesterday
More tadpole
Tell the twilight
That was moments ago
A bit brighter
No place in this world is as rich in life
As the ones that are both
The marsh
The reef
The rainforest
This is creation
You are standing in the thick of it
In the muck of it
Tell me now
That what is not clearly this or that
Is not absolutely, absolutely
Necessary
Write me out of your protections
If you will
Erase the possibility of me
Un-sanction my defiance
I will still see myself
In every metamorphosis
In every gradual dawning
In every indefinite shoreline
In everything in between
In everything
~ Nic Caddell