Galleynipper

Where we might go, in the summers, to a cabin on the big lake
and spend time there in the light, my sister and I, doing
nothing, playing in the sand, slowly turning brown and learning
to see through the glare, my mother with her book, her sunbonnet,

and nights in that room of open rafters, curtains drawn against
a cold wind off the bay: if we were good she would let us have
one candle, in a saucer on the deal table, in the exact center
of our bedroom, that we could not touch, but only watch making

shadows among the iron headboards, the rafters, the curved frame
of the mirror: until we saw our own faces, in a strange slow dusk,
swimming out past a point where we would be taken by the waves
and carried under, into a darkness that beat nightlong outside

our window. Not once did I outlast the candle’s glimmering,
to know true blackness, but lay there watching through a blur
of lashes, through my own weariness, hearing my sister
begin her even rowing toward that other shore, waiting to see what

insect or flying creature chance might allow in the room
through a crack in the door or a tear in the screen. Watched
how they preened themselves in the light, how they tilted
toward its center: moth the color of sand, midge or miller hatched

out of dust, and about to return, rendered mad now, taking
leave of their senses, erratically orbiting, coming in closer,
changing the shadows too, casting up their own ghosts, adding
to the slow beating carrying me toward sleep-shapes that would be

only a pool of wax and grit by morning, smudge of wick, drift
of gauzy wing caught like amber. But one of those creatures
alone came as though drawn not by flame but by light itself,
content to float back and forth above the beds, the sleeping

sister, and long ago I heard my father call it by its old
Hoosier name, this pale, slow-moving, slow-beating, hushed fly
or harmless mosquito that seemed undrawn by fire, and hovered
beneath the rafters, or skimmed the walls, as though searching

galleynipper, he called it, that comes in the dead of night,
that asks nothing, that is huge and slow and going nowhere
except back and forth in the shadows, that will not hurt you,
that is too wise to believe in a candle or its dark image

guttering, past midnight, in a patched and scaling mirror:
galleynipper, that had come for me, that would carry me high
above the waves, the sleeping figures adrift, even above the light,
and I would know when we had come to the right place.