After All

[rejectomorph]

Night frees the air of much heat, but heat lurks in the house, avoiding the open windows, withdrawing into still corners, and stuffing the attic. The house will exhale, hour after hour, gradually expelling the day's remnant, that memory of the sun's fierceness. Meanwhile, the fat moon rises and its light begins to penetrate the woods, finding each small gap among the leaves and needles, sketching brightness treetop to earth.

The moonlight moves the way the cool air moves, the way the scent of jasmine moves. Each accomplishes a slow, certain displacement of what it is not, but what it contains or obeys— the moonlight being another memory of the sun, and the jasmine's scent the sun's energy transformed by earth and water and air, and the coolness rising up the ridges being drafted by the heat rising from the sun-baked desert beyond the mountains. Night is full of the sun's dreams, even as the sun wakes elsewhere.




Sunday Verse

Summer

by Georg Trakl


At evening the complaint of the cuckoo
Grows still in the wood.
The grain bends its head deeper,
The red poppy.

Darkening thunder drives
Over the hill.
The old song of the cricket
Dies in the field.

The leaves of the chestnut tree
Stir no more.
Your clothes rustle
On the winding stair.

The candle gleams silently
In the dark room;
A silver hand
Puts the light out;

Windless, starless night.


–translated by James Wright and Robert Bly