Trees at Twilight

A robin berates me from the crab apple tree. I’m grilling in the backyard. Twilight ignores the robin, silently flattening the branch it’s perched on.

Nightfall collapses the third dimension that color, in league with light, props up. The faint light shows only boundaries—the sharp edges of darkness: the jagged skyward teeth of a row of arbor vitae. The crisp, ever more delicate branching of leafless trees. All carbon paper cutouts now. A breeze might persuade branches to bend, but only side-to-side.

Low light encourages stillness, inside and out; it rewards awareness. Everything stands in the same plane when there’s nothing to mark distance, but even in this light there are small hints. The tangled branches of those two trees can’t possibly touch; I can tell. Or maybe I just remember.

When do we learn to feel distances at night? Staring at the ceiling, sleepless, re-calibrating our sight as we grope for drowsiness? By the fire, comparing the shadows it casts to the silhouettes of trees? Listening to a robin across the dimming backyard, our eyes closed? Where in our bodies do dusky things exert their pull?

The lawns are dull, drab carpets. Houses and garages, their edges softer and straighter, rest lightly on them. The trees feel closer and more present. It strikes me how persistent, how steady and solid trees are. I wonder about their weight; try to heft them in my mind without the distraction of bark. I wonder if the inside of a tree is as dark as it looks against the impossibly deep blue fathoms of twilight.