Gaylord Brewer Nocturne The storm has cooled the night, and although I read today that the month just ended was the hottest in recorded human history, I sit quietly in pleasant darkness. Summers after they vanished, a few lightning bugs have returned to chart their positions. Not the blinking skies of my childhood, but numbers sufficient to encourage. Perhaps I focus too much on losses—those arrived, those surely coming. Not to do so is a continual challenge. For many years I called out the clutches of baby screech owls from our woods. There was a precise shade of twilight that I came to know expertly, the tangible moment to hurry from the dinner table and begin my primitive trills at the edge of the clearing. They would arrive, swift and silent, often landing only feet above me. Keen, inquisitive, defining their merciless lives. We would do this dance every evening in summer and into autumn, until it was too dark for human eyes and I ceded to them their domain of night. For a moment the heat has relented. I listen to my breathing and let the dark settle into me. This wounded world, this immensity, to be a small part of it but belonging no less than any other. Somewhere behind, above the crickets and katydids, a tremulous, descending wail begins, a call I once attempted to learn. Ghostly hunter returned to say hello, or goodbye, or merely to gaze at what remains.
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