Real Night
       

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.

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Copyright © 2016 Adam Scheffler All rights reserved
from A Dog's Life
Jacar Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission