Redrawn in the Dark
A nightjar encounter.
A dusk-skim of feathers. She’s there again: perched low, mottled like a piece of fallen evening. I blink and she’s background.
Sap threads my fingerprints. Slow. Amber-stubborn. I feel caught myself. Motion might break the spell. She’s quiet again: part of the branch except for the slight alertness of her shape. Then she lifts, and the air admits it had been holding her this whole time.
Her call trembles out: churr, churr. The sky leans into lilac. I take another step and lose her.
If there’s a path, she’s tracing it behind her: thin as a memory and just as hard to hold. My heartbeat quickens at each glimpse – wing-edge, silhouette. The idea of flight. She’s simply finishing the shape of her night, and I’m the one who keeps being redrawn.
Her absence leads. I follow.
I carry the stickiness of resin, and the quick alertness she taught my eyes. She disappears into what she’s always belonged to. I stand there longer than I need to, still feeling the possibility of wings. The cold air settles against my throat, and something in me stays lifted.
She brightens by vanishing, and I am left smudged with the dark that loved her.
This piece doesn’t describe an encounter it becomes one. The nightjar isn’t observed; she’s felt, like breath on the skin or memory in the chest. Each line moves with the hush of dusk, where presence and disappearance blur. The narrator isn’t chasing a bird they’re being unmade and remade by her quiet, vanishing grace. There’s something sacred in the way the air “admits it had been holding her,” as if the world itself had paused to cradle her weightless truth. And when she’s gone, it’s not absence that remains, but a kind of imprint resin on fingertips, alertness in the eyes, the ache of having been seen by something wilder than language. This isn’t just nature writing. It’s devotion in the dark.
Photograph by: https://unsplash.com/@rjak