Night – by Beth Walker

Night
after reading Thoreau

Henry David, you should see these stars.
Who would have thought a porch swing could be
the driver’s seat of the galaxy
but you? That hammering in your ears,
more like a pulse, a heartbeat,
marched you straight into jail 100 years
before MLK. What did you hear
between clanging bars and coughing convicts?
Always the singe of crickets at twilight?
A wellspring that gulped and blubbed
out of sight no matter how hard you looked,
splatting out a constant time in the night?
You knew your pond was the hub
of the universe. You made me glad I came
this far, though I never read that much of you.
You could grab a dozen pencils at a time
in hands that never felt a woman’s breast or hair.
(You were so shy and always making lists.)
I should think her hair’s most what you missed
in your shack on coal-oil lamp nights,
your phantom lover’s touch as sure and even
as the scratchings from the graphite you held,
humped over your make-shift desk,
fireflies and stars sole company.
Sometimes, you couldn’t tell which
were which, those switches of light.
Me? I never heard the stars sing like fireflies
until someone said: Look at the night sky.
It’s important. And he wasn’t even a poet.
Well, you know the rest. They blinked in code,
the silent tom-tom of the heart, and I saw
the Milky Way like a bewitching streak of gray
dropping the full length of black
black hair down a woman’s back.
I’ve met your lady, Henry David.