more like a brusque announcement: "Coming through."
(But who are we to speak
for each south-faring beak?)
Tossed from the clouds, their parting harsh halloo
distracts us from these rusty leaves we rake
but for a moment. In their dimming wake
we stand, marooned in stillness on the edge
of what they oar away from in their wedge:
the waters soon to lock, the hardening ground,
the tarnished heavens closed to the earthbound.
CHARLES WRIGHT
American Twilight
Why do I love the sound of children's voices in unknown games
So much on a summer's night,
Lightning bugs lifting heavily out of the dry grass
Like alien spacecraft looking for higher ground,
Darkness beginning to sift like coffee grains
over the neighborhood?
Whunk of a ball being kicked,
Surf-suck and surf-spill from traffic along the by-pass,
American twilight,
Venus just lit in the third heaven,
Time-tick between "Okay, let's go," and "This earth is not my home."
Why do I care about this? Whatever happens will happen
With or without us ,
with or without these verbal amulets.
In the first ply, in the heaven of the moon, a little light,
Half-light, over Charlottesville.
Trees reshape themselves, the swallows disappear, lawn sprinklers do the wave.
Nevertheless, it's still summer: cicadas pump their boxes,
Jack Russell terriers, as they say, start barking their heads off,
And someone, somewhere, is putting his first foot, then the second,
Down on the other side,
no hand to help
him,
no tongue to wedge its weal.
