Monday Notes
What was it? Smell of mown hay through the windows, tonight. The bobolink nests are deserted, the hayfield full of crickets. Monotonies of mockingbird and one whippoorwill way out in the marsh with the bullfrogs where last week you'd have heard the peepers and yellowthroats. A young buck walked toward me along the road, a cloud of mosquitoes buzzing around its head. I've seen this one before.
But I woke up early this morning and walked out to the barrens, heard the nighthawks booming, cutting slim circles around me like swallows do, and I heard the whippoorwill chant from somewhere green and deep in the clover up the hill. I waited there, knelt down in a shallow ditch, took out my recorder and listened a bit longer and then watched the green spreading out of the woods and over the fields until, in a moment, the sandpipers felt it, too, and three of them took up the call. Then it was the meadowlark, and then the towhees, the vesper and field sparrows.
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What's the feeling, you said, if we couldn't live it? Life, place, a body moves out of the need: the light falls and in the dark it's beside us. Local as the sea, having compassed us both and how many others unsleeping.
You'd dreamt and woken in dreams throughout the night. Sun-drenched, at first, like the rustling edge of a field, and then, toward morning, in older late succession greens, all the voices coming from far up, so thin you had to strain to hear them. You open your eyes to hear better but it's dark and you live here. Tomorrow's light pours through the window. Tomorrow? No, things are closer. You will not even have to move.
But I dreamt last night I was going somewhere along the coast and looking for a bird. It was as though back then (because this had gone on years, hundreds of years ago) I missed nothing unless I'd dreamt about it first, everything lost, all things missed known and called out of the need for them and so won back.
And I wouldn't have even called it a need, back then, but would have felt the lack like a wave reaching to all indifferently, pushing over marginal ways not my own, exceeding the shore in its warmth and then receding, moving back and leaving us wandering over the place it's left. What can we know, I'd say, a bit too warmly, except life? that all we can know will be life?
They were purple martins. A man said: I remember back when I was a child, in the summer, how they used to nest in the gourds we'd hang from the attic windows. I looked up and saw them there over the sea and my heart was full. I told him this. He said something I didn't catch. He had seen something or other out behind me, past my shoulder, and I followed his eyes.