May 20, Nightjar
Almanac for Post Moderns
A Whippoorwill sang at 10pm last night. When I went out to listen, the clear ‘whip-poor-will’ had passed. The only sound was a low owl-like flutter — same length sound, same pause, repeated well after I came back into the house.
The darkness quiets sight. Different from morning songs, nightsong is wholly uncluttered by the expectation of seeing. Whippoorwills give the woods vocal and spatial context. Nightsong is almost an aural silhouette; hear it and attention turns toward it in bright focus. When the song pauses, attention tunes to the song’s echo through the dark.
Bats are also out now, above the pond, catching insects. Odd we don’t call them lonely . . . Still, we will ply such anthropomorphics on these birds. Whippoorwills may sing in the dark, but I listened with such singular tuning the night seemed lit, expansive, and, in echo, full of possibility . . .
Seems American sensibility, might call it imagination, shunts this possibility, this freedom. Call it fear of the dark, or loneliness, sense of progress, the ‘undarking’ of America’s lonely ‘nature’ could be its own catalytic and life-affirming industry.
