Aquarium of the Night

JILL WIDNER

         —for MMMMMM

I feel as though I’ve been awake for hours or that I haven’t slept at all. But I must have. I was thinking of what you told me once about the solar plexus. The way it looks something like a dense spider web stuck onto the front of the aorta, but thick, as if years and years of spiders had deposited their webs there, maybe like a cocoon that was cut open and flattened out. 
Layers of spider webs piled on the heart? 
Not piled on the heart, piled on the aorta, the garden hose-sized tube that carries blood to the lower half of the body. 
I could see nothing but spiders then, poised on a heart, salivating endlessly, building their webs. You corrected me on this, too. 
The silk that spiders use to construct their webs is generated from special spinneret devices. 
I must have been thinking of silk worms. Then you were telling me about the tensile-strength property of silk—greater than steel, you said. Only I didn’t know whether you were referring to the spider’s silk or the silkworm’s silk. It’s often like that when we correspond. 
I began to think of the state that separates sleep from consciousness as a plexus of silk, and as I peered at it and through it, there through the screen came the sounds of the night. Slight wind in the dogwood tree. The small sound of bamboo. I was thinking of a walk we once took. Brushstrokes of kanji on a tearoom window. Moldering brick in a parking lot. Bright blades of grass in the cracks in between. You kept stopping. You kept turning to me. It surprised me every time. It was so unlike you. So unlike the you I thought I knew. The flash of your eyes before they closed. Flying fish blue. Darker than that. Flint. Slate. The base of a spark. So close, the sidewalks disappeared. 
Your silence now feels like a dream I can’t wake from. I don’t know what it means. There’s a poem about what must happen after long silence. It’s Yeats:  “Speech after long silence; it is right, / The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night, / That we descant and yet again descant.”  
Why does he say we? They can’t both descant if he’s the one telling the story. He must have decided to descant for both of them. Though what it is he descants upon, I can’t remember. So I shall descant in his stead. Upon your silence.

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