Night Singing

Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela

has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials

of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment

and droned dead in schools and after Eliot has gone home

from the Sacred Heart and Ransom has spat and consigned

to human youth what he reduced to fairy numbers

after the name has become slightly embarrassing

and dried skins have yielded their details and tapes have been

slowed and analyzed and there is nothing at all

for me to say one nightingale is singing

nearby in the oaks where I can see nothing but darkness

and can only listen and ride out on the long note’s

invisible beam that wells up and bursts from its

unknown star on on on never returning

never the same never caught while through the small leaves

of May the starlight glitters from its own journeys

once in the ancestry of this song my mother visited here

lightning struck the locomotive in the mountains

it had never happened before and there were so many

things to tell that she had just seen and would never

have imagined now a field away I hear another

voice beginning and on the slope there is a third

not echoing but varying after the lives

after the goodbyes after the faces and the light

after the recognitions and the touching and tears

those voices go on rising if I knew I would hear

in the last dark that singing I know how I would listen

Source: The Vixen (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)