crepuscular

The bell is the first thing to go.

Not gone — just receding,

that particular arpeggio of commerce and childhood growing smaller down the block

the way everything good sounds when it’s leaving —

you can hear it three streets over now,

someone else’s kids running toward it in someone else’s version of this evening,

bare feet on warm concrete,

the specific urgency of a thing that will not wait for you,

and then the neighborhood exhales,

and the birds begin their accounting.

There is a meeting every evening that nobody called and everyone attends.

The sparrows finish their argument —

whatever it was, it is resolved now or abandoned,

which in bird culture are the same thing —

and the wrens make their last declarative statements

about territory,

about presence,

about I was here today and I will be here tomorrow,

and then, one by one,

they clock out.

You can hear it if you’re paying attention —

the specific subtraction, species by species,

the daytime shift punching out and heading home through

whatever sky they navigate by,

and the light doing the same thing,

pulling its colors back in the order it lent them —

the yellow first,

then the white,

keeping the gold for last the way you save the thing you don’t want to give up

until there’s nothing left to negotiate with.

The children are the hardest part.

Not sad — just true —

the way the sound of them goes from everywhere to specific to gone:

first the whole neighborhood,

that ambient chorus of joy and grievance

and someone’s name being called from a porch with increasing seriousness —

then just the ones on your block,

then just the ones next door,

then a single voice at the end of the street,

then the screen door,

then

nothing

but the space where they were,

which the evening moves into immediately,

not rudely,

just

the way nature fills what’s been vacated.

The frogs clock in without ceremony.

No announcement, no tuning up, no moment of transitional silence —

one moment the frogs are not,

and the next moment the frogs simply are,

as if they have been waiting just below the threshold of hearing all day,

patiently waiting their turn,

and then the crickets find their frequency and lock in —

that single sustained note that is not one cricket but all of them,

the individual voices long since disappeared into the collective:

a river into the sea;

and somewhere out past the edge of where the streetlights fracture the night,

a lone howl that says

I know you.

 I am not afraid of you.

I am something the daylight hours have no name for.

The light does not die.

it migrates.

Moves from sky to water,

water to glass,

glass to the particular amber of a window in a house where someone is doing whatever it is that people do at this hour —

making dinner or

making peace or

standing at the sink looking out at the last of the gold on the yard

without knowing why they stopped to look,

just a sense they needed to look up…

just knowing something was happening out there worth witnessing

even if they couldn’t have told you what —

the sky performing its nightly magic act,

pulling the light through its fingers

one shade at a time