— with A.

“You don’t look at the light, the light looks at you.” The moth says to me, secretly, trying to parse a sense of what I would, in the missing end, call ‘devotion’, but is, by some technical reduction, called ‘phototaxis’. I’m only half listening anyways. The moth is repeating the same phrases, “You don’t look at the light, the light looks at you,” all the while, all the while I am trying to write a letter.

It’s a letter to a lover. We were, it seemed, attending to seduction. Within the knot of our tongues, a bridge that creaks, it is a question of seduction as a decision or a discipline. “You don’t look at the light. The light looks at you.” Before I tell this lover of the letter that they are every butterfly that passes me by, I ask them a question. “You don’t look at the light.” I asked: well, how did you find you were seduced? In the same breath, I ask: can one reckon with their seduction? “The light,” the moth repeats, “looks at you.” The letter thus began.

First, in response to my question, they ask: is seduction a discipline? Later, two breaths later, they say: obliquely I say, I have failed to establish the jurisdiction of your seductions. Nastaarabu [I am not, for I am not]. I responded with a question: is seduction a decision? This was the first part of my response. Surrounding our tongues, at the moment, in our mouths, surrounding this our attendance, were all sorts of incidents of light. At the time, in my mouth, was his architecture of the secret, who? I can’t say; was the one with hope, one of the ones we came to find out; was their (the lover of the letter’s) bracketed dream along with my mere unbracketing called, similarly, ‘dream’. (And so, [they wrote], [they wrote of a dream, a dream that was this, before posing the question: is seduction a discipline?], [written, it was, this dream, in an absolute past, before before…], your mouth and the lilt of your lips; how sweet that while of me cocking my ear closer and closer and then, slurp, the voice, her nights, their shepherd, are floating in the years of my frequencies). [And my dream], to dream I am walking the reed of your back, to walk and music is playing, to dream and dream and never return from dreaming. Or a finger instead of feet, of your back a flute of trepidatious necessity — bridge, boat, groaning water, the beach of ecstasy and terror where we might be said to have finally taken a breath, resting. Imagine all this began from the ear. “You don’t look… you don’t look at… you don’t look at the….”

The second part of my response: is seduction a decision? I cannot answer how or if or when or where or how I was seduced, even if I can say, seductively, that I was. I was, if anything, summoned. They responded: and here it is. Where was the opening, hii boma nilijipata? [this belly, or this deep, I was found within?] It was this back of the neck, which I am yet to witness — magnum mysterium. And the waterfall anayeikinga [that portends with solemnity], a set of waterfalls merging into a new kind of twinned pulse, pengine kuhemahema [somewhere breathing breathing] pengine kuimba [somewhere the song is], each pathway of wet bulbs surrendering to the Brownian motion where it all began. And then there was a wrist and there was all this frivolous skating… one could go on, but the seducer does not decide, and if the seduced is also seducing, they too do not decide. The discipline is that the seduction decides, induces, immerses the mooting of choice with the sweetness of inevitability, like a melody you forgot you wrote before that other Before, but must remember because there is it: swaying, exactly in time. Don’t eat, and you eat. “The light… the light looks… the light looks at….”

I never responded after this response, as I seemed to be waking up from a dream. Though, how could I respond but to respond that I am seduced? Many breaths later, we kissed, though I can’t be sure, close enough to the mist of the night sky as it drizzled. Without asking, they asked me: what is your hesitancy? Looking at their eyes, forgetting my feet, I asked: have you kissed in the rain? Once, was their answer. “Once.”

After, gold and salt reappeared — this what we came to call what creaks of the bridge. There was a third question, that neither of us asked: does the sun have to rise? “You don’t look at the light… The light looks at you.”

*

And so. The letter doesn’t come. The question remains. I want to risk writing: the letter doesn’t come, if the question remains. Perhaps, or; perhaps the letter doesn’t come, or the question remains. But I don’t. Decision or discipline, decision if… I haven’t responded except to vaguely say I love you; that is, Tonight, sage tea, all these unhelpful pillows, Hagerea with Aster Aweke, the creaks and the quiet, the solitude of this place, ladybug warmth, tongue tasted aches, I am here, and there, not; Tonight, I want to whisper to your hands that I love you, I love you if I love you, I love you or I love you, I vaguely love you, I love you vaguely… [How to measure this grief, that what love is?] The moth remains, repeating, repeating the same letter: “You don’t look at the light. The light looks at you.”

As the sun rose, I heard less and less from the moth. In fact, shadow that I am, after a while I couldn’t hear a thing though at one point there was everything to be heard. Many breaths prior, the sun did rise though the question of the sun remained. It, all of this, here, there, not, all wants to be true; it all wants to be true. I walked out of it, wet with the drizzle, dew of the morning of the dream and there it was, a butterfly, the night’s drizzle drizzling the same. It was bright, but now I wasn’t so sure, I couldn’t really say. The letter I was trying didn’t come, though it did, it did if it began, that is. Devotion, devotion, devotion or devotion, devotion if devotion; devotion, all of this, all of it, all the same… [to measure this grief, without measure go into it or go into it, “devotion, devotion all the same.”]

*

And what if it’s still raining when I wake up? Will I have woken up? Why must the dream close? What if I am still in the kiss, that a kiss be the eclipse taking place in the night? Why must the dream close? Why must the dream close? they kept asking; they, that is, the lover of the letter of the question of the light.

“Why must the dream close?”

What do I say?

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Brian Muraya is a poet from Nairobi, Kenya.