Real Night

--Adam Scheffler

       

I miss it - no streetlamps, where

you have to depend on the moon, where soccer

at dusk in an open field

is a void full of voices and shadows

ringing out, forming, scattering —

even this walk in Indiana, late June,

10 PM when we're outside the woods

we can still see them.

Notes from the electric guitar drift over

from the restaurant, half-mile distant

lit up like a deep sea fish.

Real night is going extinct, you

tell me, a sole astronomer has it

lives so high up in the Alps, in the starlab alone

that he says he never wants to come down

never wants to leave the stepping outside

from note-taking and instruments

into the conflagration, unshared, only his

silent stars, drunk with blackness?

I take your wrist to feel the thin bones.

The dog stays close for once brushing my leg.

There are still hints of real night

here, I think: fireflies scattering

constellations down open tunnels of trees,

beckoning this way — or the stag earlier,

standing at the dusk edge of the woods,

tearing at hanging leaves, glaring through

round black eyes, slipping

into the forest-hole behind him — or now,

entering those woods, the bullfrogs calling

and calling, drowning out the guitar in

their touch-swamp: gorgeous pure and empty,

branches streaming over our heads,

warm breeze on our faces on our cheeks.