Sleeping with lights on

3 Hypotheses i. They had grown accustomed to sleeping with the lights on: lights of the houseglow, lights of the port’s mouth, the light of my phone. Daybreak diluted   by the shadow of a moth who dulled in the presence of each flicker.   The generation prior had grown large to the light, generation after: wiser, for his would be the last with burns on the apex of wings. Clever, he learned distance over instinct. And those who watched traded words like wild for domestic ‘til all the wild and all the domestic spun into a halo of judgement.   It was maintained—wild/domestic—in this place as repetition in opposition, replication of the selves. ii. Nicotiana glauca crossed easily to land where the whim goes thrashing petioles for hours thrashing petioles for molecules. Strelitzia to strelitzia, queer to the rhythm of pollination; Nicotiana glauca fierce in the process of preservation. A fantasy generation—so close and utterly not the same, like atoms of an ancestor cell. Bacteria back then, before, not knowing it first. Since then, time taught ‘native’ if: ‘invasive’ than: until an insect’s wing was in- and outwardly lit. [Suffering burns as affection.] I have gotten used to the intricacies of species, speculations that twist and break and branch our expectations. How often the world you know, and strange, and altered, still, can astonish form. iii. It was desire, thin dust to night sky that echoed into change. This modern world is grey and old, / And what remains to us of thee? (1) Half of this life came from the divestment of earthly goods shaken clear from seeds and feathers. I assumed Pan meant this as revision. Familiar winds passed like bright light through ____________, a monitor of the city. A niche to bend will. Was the ocean spray as innocent as the rest—? Dewdrops kissed the earth and licked the limestone from cliff faces before going dry and faint. Forgivable and tame. 1 Oscar Wilde, ‘Pan’ in Charmides and Other Poems, 1913, Methuen & Co. LTD, London _ 3 Hypotheses, written by Nina Hanz