Your Electric Light

When we need it, your electric light is there to find feet in the tangled night-time woods, traipsed recklessly. Whisky vision is good enough to reason with a small cliff-face, to spot a foothold, best yet to be delighted by it. The woods feel wilder than the ones I grew up with, and there’s no doubting I know them not a bit. Whisky only makes the heart grow unremittant, more fevered, lots of other things, more forgetful without losing reaction to it all. I forgot to navigate. A trickled stream makes itself known visually, almost catches your ankle, and a vague notion is swigged by my far too wandering mind delightful; streams run down, to the river, to the path, but we smiled relentless away from it, losing little. It feels like what it looks like, any time, from setting out to long before the dawn and there is no timepiece comes to eye, and it pleases me. I could die out here; I could live out here; brambles tear at legs and you, like me, keep walking. It is a universal truth, particularly applicable in the midst of flowing whisky, that there are no wrong turns when travelling blind. Very easy, and surprising to tree-trained eyes, a clearing strolls for seven yards ahead and the moon is visible only just. We sit or collapse, though not exhausted, and the still-flowered very early autumn stretch of woodland grass is not big enough to be a destination. We decide anyway, with almost nominal scepticism from some quarters, that the next leg of the journey is return. And that’s much quicker.

Your electric light proved as useful on the way back as it did on the outward clamber, maybe more so. We made it, as you know, to the safety of our harbour. The night’s sleep, though grizzled by whisky, was restful from adventure; morning, just lately, feels longer ago.

Next time, or the same time because the past has not kept grip sufficient, if I have my way, there will be no return journey, no thought of batteries. Your electric light will come from eyes and, converging with my eyes, and her eyes, and his eyes, will be light enough to grow the universe, make a clearing home; the roof dangling from clouds, the trees already walls, the sea nearer this time, and that patch in sunlight there looks to be a field of corn to me. Guitar alright with the smoke from fire come night-time, significant soon to birds, there is moonshine aplenty, but really we’re drunk from that and from actual shining of the moon, from crispest air, from your electric light, but mostly we’re drunk from that moonshine whisky and it tastes so very good.