The Singing Dark
He had heard the three a.m. whistling
as if from his own bones.
He had fallen asleep on the sofa again with the hound dog
who knew how to curl into itself
to preserve the dark
and all the sounds therein.
It had suddenly become autumn,
and the fireplace made strange clicking sounds
like ticks pulled from fur and tossed into the flames.
Must be the wind, he thought, as he knew his dog
was clean. Even her underbelly,
near the hind legs, where the fur curled.
But what of the work of the day, still clinging to him
even as he slept? What perplexed the depth
of his lack of dreams?
Outside, the wind kept rattling
the steel siding of the house
as if a great bear was determined to get in. He had heard
the whingeing before as if from his skin, some song both
troubling and slightly less so. Like fish embedded
in the complicated tackle of the body, straining
to get out of his flesh through the streambed
of this bone or that. He knew these midnight naps
must stop. A man must learn to go to bed and sleep
proper-like, not lie there through anthracite chunks
of the night, just feet from the cookstove,
just to be with his dog.
How did the hound know to preserve the darkest parts
of the dark, as if they were light? Who taught her
to curl into herself, and how did she learn
to read the dark, in the dark?
He knew the world out there was singing — all of it.
And he knew certain hours when he could
determine the meaning of what he figured
must be words sunk in the song. Perhaps the floating
world of his bed would offer a chance to dream
the watery depths of the womb-world waiting like starlight
to sing to him among the rusty sheds that clunked and clung
from his past weathers. Perhaps the singing dark was also inside
those sheds, inside him, among the hacksaws and chisels,
the wrenches and drills, waiting to crack
his bones closed in order to open and heal them.
◆ ◆ ◆
Autumnal Equinox
The crows are eating my belly on a night of blistering rain. Or is that just the half-hidden moon casting a shadow over dry land? Someone has let the I Ching coins out of the backyard again, unsupervised and howling this way and that as they try to predict the present. Now the world will never be complete, continuously changing as if caught season to season in the steady mouth of rain. These are the last precious days of summer, Antonín Dvořák complained and then composed the New World Symphony. The crows continue gnawing on my gut, and I dream I let the hound dogs out of my mouth to shape the trees with whatever word the woods want. To scour the ground and follow this tree or that. Sycamore, hickory, oak. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a camel, Dvořák said, steadying himself against the banister, than for a hound to found the mouth. What is present is past. Words flounder, and the calendar turns and blurs. There are moths in my half-eaten body. Moths finding their cold-weather way in. Fog collects, then muddles the mouth, drizzling down around. The days cool, and the moon keeps shrinking. And beyond all possible human perception, we somehow keep floating around the sun, looking for a way out of this new world.