While the Nightingale Sang He Dreamt of Waking
A river of cold wind rattles the withered leaves
muting birdsong.
The overcast afternoon it routed had dulled sunlight
burnished heartache
and he'd begun the count again
of years misspent
wandering the winters of imagination:
early days, quick on southern seas
months of hardship
the exultation of return
when the first full moon of autumn lights the tundra with new silver,
jewelled with bonfires for our homecoming.
The late autumn sun rising slowly
had caught him at the window
lost in the echoed song of a distant thrush,
recalling harsh dawns
whose changes he has yet to understand.
We entered Marshall by dugout
a passenger of Konyanh
from River Cess, south
on the Basa coast.
He brought the bow
of the seaworthy canoe
(cut from one mahogany log)
to the verge of mud flats
where fish with stub legs
scuttled from brackish water.
At night, there, the crude paddles
leave phosphorescent trails
lighting the way for water leopards
the dark, unquiet ancestors
who want the children back.
Konyanh stood.
There were five notes,
five clear notes quickly trilled,
and he was sky-gazing again
tangled in the paraphernalia of a season
that long has marked for him
the year's beginning--
when earth renews itself in landscapes of sorrow.
The nets, crudely knotted, are cast
I tied them myself
Starlight in water confounds them
Nothing is snared
but slips through
like starlight in water,
Stars burn down behind my eyes
spending heat for reckless passion
light for dubious learning.
Then the call:
a clarion bird
five clear, morning notes
and his teeth bare to the wind.
In dreams, stars are born
behind our eyes
The rough nets drift apart
like galaxies In dreams
there are beginnings
and beginnings again
and whispers from the other world
He watches while she sleeps
the woman who brought him home
into whose window a thrush sings.
When Konyanh stood
sunlight splintered across his back,
ice shattering on obsidian.
He surveyed the inlet
where the dark mouth of the river
closed over the carnage of politics to come.
Leaving the canoe
the sun breaking
over his flexed arms
like starlight on black water,
he entered the bush.
Where the paddle fell
fish with stub feet broke the water.
Cold wind rattles sere leaves
subduing birdsong. He turns his memory
to a crazy-quilt of leaves
red and gold apples
tumbling toward the park
then, when joy was manifest
when all that was or was to be
lay in escrow for tomorrow
and fallen leaves
countless as stars
prepared the earth for spring.
--Michael Foster