The amphibian croaks and insect chirps lie against a backdrop of silence, as the emerging stars lie against the darkness. The empty roads are walled by still trees, and no one passes. No breezes stir the leaves, no dogs bark. Repose is here, and night is like a waking dream in which nothing transpires, but seems about to. Unseen moth wings flutter unheard, as soft as the air. It doesn't matter that I am going nowhere. I'm already there. I've always been there. I always will be.
Sunday Verse
Watch
by Eamon Grennan
1.
Watching it closely, respecting its mystery,
is the note you've pinned above this heavy Dutch table
that takes the light weight of what you work at,
coaxing the seen and any mystery it might secrete
into words that mightn't fall too far short, might let you
hear how the hum of bees in the pink fuchsia
and among the buttercups and fat blackberries
is echoed by that deep swissshhh sound that is
your own blood coursing its steady laps
and speaking in beats to the drum of your left ear.
2.
When you watch the way the sycamore leaf curls,
browns, dries, and drops from the branch it's lived on
since spring, to be blown by a soundless breeze
along the seed heads of the uncut grass, then
the mystery that is its movement—the movement,
that is, from seed to leaf-shard and so on
to fructive dust—holds still an instant, gives a glimpse
of something that quickens away from language
into the riddling bustle of just the actual as you
grab at it and it disappears again, again unsaid.
