Germany: Night On The Lake

There’s only a few hours at most of dark night here in summer. The kind of night where the sky is nearly black or so deep a blue you can’t see the trees in silhouette. Yet here, around the twenty-third hour, eleven p.m. the sky finally becomes that color. Until then, it’s twilight, first a pale yet dense blue, and then like denim so that if you walk outside, in a way it’s clear to see but there’s an edge of unreality, of shadow at certain angles. It makes me think of mysterious beings met at stone shrines deep within the wood. A woman in a fine gown as delicate as gossamer, faintly shining, but her eyes are as black as the earth and her lips curved and the most innocent rose.

Or of the cloaked figure passing from shadow to shadow, from tree to tree, never hurrying. Waiting for you but just far enough away so you can’t catch them until they wish it.

“Sir,” you say, as it slows, and lets you come abreast. “Who are you?”

“I?” the being questions, whispery voice tingling along your spine. “Why… I am just what you were searching for….”

He turns to you, his face a glowing oval above the inkiness of his clothing. Impossibly handsome yet gentle, smiling a secret smile. A hand lifts and beacons you under the wing of his cloak. Mesmerized you go and are immersed within the scents of pine and earth and mountain air, and your mind is swept away to a vision of flying.

On your next breath you look up into eyes the color of the sky at dawn, grey and swirling with ruddy hues. You’re lost even before the curving lips brush yours, then part to kiss down your neck.

By two-thirty and close to three a.m., the sky is lightening again and by five it is a proper morning and the breeze rises as it does daily, blowing the morning dew away.

I lay looking out of the window, up at the tall trees outside, and in the distance, behind them, through them, I see the silver of the lake. Time passes and you’re just held in the moment, the sounds of birdsong, the rustle of leaves. It’s seven a.m. and I’m getting sleepy. I drift off and dream of sailing.