A sudden south wind buffets the house, roars in the ridgetop trees for a few minutes & dies. I go out to take a leak. The moon hasn’t risen yet & it’s dark. Nightcrawlers rustle under the lilac, dragging fragments of leaves into the ground.
Wood smoke: must be from the Amish in Sinking Valley. I inhale greedily. On the other side of the mountain, the deep labored thrum of a locomotive is followed a long minute later by the whistle—an almost orgasmic release.
At this time of night, it would be perfectly reasonable to confuse a hawk with a handsaw. In the crawlspace under my floor, some small mammal scratches the cold-air return duct with restless, dreaming claws.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Bridge to Nowhere
- Natural Faculties
- (Re-)Claiming the Body
- Ceiling snakes
- Train Song
- Surgery of the Absurd
- Notes toward a taxonomy of sadness
- Weeding
- Blanket
- Forecast
- Curriculum Vitae
- Lullaby
- Fist
- On Reading The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda
- Gibbous
- Song of the Millipede
- Autumn haibun
- Bread & Water
- Jersey Shore
- Initiation
- October dusk
- Goodnight moon
- Antidote
- The Starlings
- To the Child I Never Had
- Ambitions
- Learn Harmonica Today
- Two-line haiku
- Sleeper Cell
- Unchurched
- Turnips
- Homiletics
- Magic Carpet
- When the Wind is Southerly
- Connection
- Ground Beetle
- Étude for the World’s Smallest Violin
Nice contemplative piece, Dave!
Sharp, vivid and seasonal. I like the sense of nature at work beneath woodsmoke and train whistle.
Thanks, guys. I’m glad to hear this worked for you, because I really wasn’t sure whether it held together, with only the barest hint of a thematic thread.
Love this.
It held.
Thanks. Good to know!
It more than held. I just closed my eyes and was there!
Sorry, that sounds a tad creepy. I’m not stalking.
:) Thanks, Clive.
I’ve been stumping round the house singing this ever since reading this post. Although arguably not quite so well.
Woodsmoke is I think the most evocative of all smells for me. Every now and then I catch a snatch on the breeze while cycling through London and am immediately transported to multiple other destinations in space and time.
I had to google nightcrawlers. Imagine having the job title “nightcrawler hunter”. Funkadelic.
I didn’t know about that song. Nice tune. Agreed about woodsmoke. And yes, nightcrawlers are very cool… even if they are an invasive species here.