Night Sounds

Brent Cotton

Night Sounds


And now the dark comes on, all full of chitter noise.

Birds huggermugger crowd the trees,

the air thick with their vesper cries,

and bats, snub seven-pointed kites,

skitter across the lake, swing out,

squeak, chirp, dip, and skim on skates

of air, and the fat frogs wake and prink

wide-lipped, noisy as ducks, drunk

on the bloozy black, gloating chink-chunk.



And now on the narrow beach we defend ourselves from  dark.

The cooking done, we build our firework

bright and hot and less for outlook

than for magic, and lie in our blankets

while night nickers around us. Crickets

chorus hallelujahs; paws, quiet

and quick as raindrops, play on the stones

expertly soft, run past and are gone;

fish pulse in the lake; the frogs hoarsen.



Now every voice of the hour -- the known,

the supposed, the strange,

the mindless, the witted, the never seen --

sing, thrum, impinge, and rearrange

endlessly; and debarred from sleep we wait

for the birds, importantly silent,

for the crease of first eye-licking light,

for the sun, lost long ago and sweet.

By the lake, locked black away and tight,

we lie, day creatures, overhearing night.



Maxine Kumin

“And now the dark comes on”, a change takes place, mysterious nocturnal creatures invade our once familiar daylight world.  Kumin prefaces each stage with "and now", "and now", "now". It's as if we are the audience for a performance of  the night orchestra. Under cover of darkness it sings, thrums, nickers, chirps, squeaks, prinks  - and every hour has a voice, a part in the chorus. Notice how the people build their fire "less for outlook than for magic", I love that. Isn't that what we build fires for mostly while camping, or evenings in the back yard - sure, we need warmth and food and light, but we also need magic. This poem reminds me of the drama of darkness, how it gives us mystery and music and a sense of familiar things becoming strange, of the known changing form and becoming new. Sometimes we don't recognize the wonder in front of us until we observe it from a different point of view. Sometimes we need the dark to show us what we have never seen.

Living

Roger Hall

Living

 

The fire in leaf and grass

so green it seems

each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves

shivering in the sun,

each day the last day.

A red salamander

so cold and so

easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet

and long tail. I hold

my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

 

Denise Levertov

Have you ever had this? Where the colours around you, or the moment you're in is so vivid, so piercingly alive, that you can't imagine life going on? For me it's mostly been instances - times when I thought "This must be the pinnacle. The very sharpest point of sight, the place and moment when everything has come together into focus." 

 

It should be the end. The culmination. Like last things. I love how Levertov moves through time and brings her scope ever tighter - "Each summer the last summer...each day the last day...each minute the last minute." It's a deep pattern running through our lives, the fact that we are most aware and awake and alive when Death is in the room. I don't mean in a macabre sense, I mean in the sense of knowing how to fully immerse ones' self because time is passing, seasons, days and minutes are leaving our hands. 

 

Last things ask us to pay attention, to absorb, to embrace. 

Leave the lesser things behind, reach for what matters. 

 

It won't always be here.