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