Goodnight

[rejectomorph]

Placid Sunday has proceeded with its usual serenity, and a quiet dusk is falling. Cool evening has gathered all the shadows together and softened them, laying them across the landscape like a fuzzy blanket. The last light of the sky makes the trees silhouettes, and the gibbous moon grows brighter by the minute while windows suddenly glow as lights are turned on in the dimming houses. The air smells of spring: grass, leaves, flowers, earth still damp from the most recent rain.


Later:

The placidity put me to sleep after I sat on the couch for a few minutes. Full night fell, and now the sky is full of cloud shapes that drift over and past the moon, now and then revealing a point of starlight in some limpid spot while the larger light is obscured. The entire sky seems alive. It is though I had kept sleeping and this was the dream I was having, but it is the waking world turned strange and abstract and amazing. Such light and darkness and shades of silver and deepest, dark blue. How prosaic the darkened earth becomes under such a skyscape. I am unable to recall from that place my adventuring thoughts. I must be as quiet as the nocturnal land.




Sunday Verse

Loss and Gain

by Geoffrey Hill


Pitched high above the shallows of the sea
lone bells in gritty belfries do not ring
but coil a far and inward echoing
out of the air that thrums. Enduringly,

fuchsia-hedges fend between cliff and sky;
brown stumps of headstones tamp into the ling
the ruined and the ruinously strong.
Platonic England grasps its tenantry

where wild-eyed poppies raddle tawny farms
and wild swans root in lily-clouded lakes.
Vulnerable to each other the twin forms

of sleep and waking touch the man who wakes
to sudden light, who thinks that this becalms
even the phantoms of untold mistakes.