Her Golden Hour
by John McCluskey

1.
He lowered the evening newspaper to his lap.
She had burst into the darkening room.
She told him what she had just heard.
“Is that right,” he responded
to the young girl uncontainable in thin light,
his face unreadable.
Then he raised his newspaper high
to catch the remains of late day sunlight
fading quickly now
from the small front room window
behind his chair.
And his face was gone.
And with it the young girl
and the last, best
light of day.

2.
Important news curiously descended upon the girl
only in evening’s golden hour,
the most critical deep into civil dusk.
This worked quite well for the girl.
In summer, she would linger outside and
consider her latest announcement to her father
while nestled deep in fireflies,
an occasional, erratic bat high up
in the last, late hour of glow.
In winter, such crepuscular comfort was found
in an earlier hour,
in evening snowflakes,
in a fog of breath
vanishing up
into cold air.

3.
Each season’s guardian angels
alighted as such upon the young girl.
She thrived under protective wings.
Upon first hearing consequential news,
the girl came to rely upon her father’s platitudes
and flat, facial affect to substantiate
a most welcome, impending procrastination.
He rarely met an otherwise expected level of urgency
to address a matter at hand. She never knew why.
But she never replaced him as her primary resource.
He was her first stop,
and she valued his
mysterious inner workings
for their unintended gift of secret time
so lavishly bestowed.

4.
Certainly, her mother would be more direct,
not leave a child’s excitement unattended.
But suspension between proclamation and conclusion
was a luxury the girl came to desire most
in matters of impending importance,
regardless of outcome.

5.
So, she would retreat outdoors alone and stay alone
(never lonely) and wait in the splendor of disengagement,
immersed in a variety of outcomes good news might bring,
none of which she was eager to abandon too quickly.
Or she might dissolve into night air,
should daggers of misfortune loom,
only to reassemble herself,
once sufficiently steeled,
though not before all matters of escape were entertained.
Once there was news of a new baby, once of a death.
Once of a kid down the street. Who made parents nervous.
All were close,
all were delicious.
She in her glory,
deep in her gloaming.

6.
Where she felt most free, in this lessening light of day,
to float among seraphic guardians of innocence,
seasonal champions of earth and soul and sky.
She would soon enough be happier or sadder
than when the day began,
and she knew the time was coming,
but in twilight
she is cherub
she is child
holding fast
in the last, best light
between departure
and arrival,
not yet fractured,
not yet whole.



 


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