Nocturne

Alexandra Yurkovsky

                    When it hurts we return to the banks 
       of certain rivers.

	       —Czeslaw Milosz

I.

It was need, a lack, that propelled me down the steps with the bike,
down University and across, down Addison and across
the tracks to Aquatic Park, my diminutive estuary accumulating from Strawberry Creek,
not even a riverrun, but with brackish tidal waters surging in from the Bay beyond I-80.
Like the waves pushing, nudging the thin green skin of algae,
I pedal through the slowly accumulating dusk, about 9 p.m., the Saturday before the longest day.

The road slopes down to the north heel of the pool, a blackbrown mirror reflecting the twilight, 
    still tawny
	(your coppery, tightly drawnback hair, long
 	     back and legs bent over your bike)
glassy stretches and scummy, scummed patches asthough scabrous with algae.
Ducks nibble with beaks so utensilar they seem to vacuum up the water bloom
and whatever other aquatic plants and micro-organisms, unconcerned about the water’s purity.
They float and paddle in pairs, in flocks, as do compact black coots,
while great and snowy egrets tend to feed and perch apart, though near each other.

Tonight, one such hunter is stalking as I approach the pool’s northwest rim.
Its presence evokes my smile, as at an absurdly fulfilled expectation,
as though a quaint appointment’s been kept;
although almost certainly it’s not the same bird each evening in this sheltered corner.
Aware yet immersed in work, its solitude an integrity,
the egret lets me watch.

The slow movements metamorphose to choreography, a spooky dance of grace and stealth,
the head undulating as the pillowy white body floats on scissoring, stalky legs.
Drenched in smoky twilight, the bird scans the darkening water,
murkier for the algae, tall grasses and sporadic trees,
alternating its eyes to zoom in on the vital food.
The neck unsnakes, coils back; the beak clamps and reclamps on the slivery, flapping, silver fish.

“Beauty.” The word captions the scene, and I cannot rub it out, creature of words that I am;
and, creature of words, I hear myself thinking words once thought by Keats,
his aphoristic phrase regarding “beauty” that critics insist is so ambiguous.
Becoming immersed in the landscape, and as though the act of witness had earned me authority,
I argue silently, convincing myself there exists no ambiguity in such life-and-death beauty,
the lithe white egret alive only by the grace of the fluty silver fish, eaten against its writhing will.

Against my will, writhing over our abortive friendship, your words intrude,
cold company – disembodied and out of context – despite how well they fit these musings.
Something along the lines of “world-woundedness” – I’m purposely mangling as much as
remember,
mostly because it hurts now to re-read what you’ve written, words never particularly addressed to 
    me anyhow,
and I nag myself I’ve got no right to quote, even less address, you;
no right in my own mind to think of you, connect the two of us anymore.

And it was that hollowness seeking to be whole, such gutsick panic,
driving me from human habitat to this place of lonesome beauty.
No, not seeking you; although, unwillingly, I lack, I want you.
And brooding on your absence in this wholeness that’s held us both
turns the plight of the fish into a lesson that almost feels, or ought to feel, true:
our botched friendship had an inevitability that makes it as true, as right, as the fish’s death.

Earth turns this hemisphere away from the sun, and so the tawny warmth evaporates,
chilling me as I walk through protracted twilight, so close to solstice,
heightening my sense of the months it’s been since we stopped contacting, stopped
    acknowledging each other;
the cursory recognition in your eyes’ pale warmth, yet recognition,
but even that’s evaporated to a paler, translucent
greenblue indifference behind mirrorblue shades.

I push on, compelled by a desire that, in circling the lagoon,
I may acquire similar delineation, a boundary of integrity;
although I’d feel grateful enough if the exercise could simply quell my tidal panics.
Then, almost as soon as I turn south, before I’ve moved on a few feet,
the exalted melancholy of another image arrests me:
Black Crowned Night Heron. Nycticorax  nycticorax. Perched on a low bough on the west
    side.

A statuesque bird jacketed in blue wing and back feathers, with a streaked black cap.
Even the guide book notes the hunched appearance; and I see shoulders raised defensively against
    cold and loneliness.
Though I know that’s a projection of my own isolation, I can’t shake the pathetic sadness it 
    elicits.
I turn back, unlock the bike, and roll home in the dark involuntarily burdened with a parting
    impression
of the polluted water throbbing weakly like the fucked-up heartbeat of the planet that parented
    such fucked-up creatures.

II.

Dragging thoughts of you through the dark, a series of iambs, jagged, more like dotted 16th notes, that jerked, sobbing rhythm as bike tires thud across eight rails, four parallel tracks, illusorily converging at vanishing point invisible in darkness, muted street lights eliciting glints from plastic reflectors spun on skeletal spokes, ghost bike taking me home to empty rooms that echo my unlived life as when I play Quicksilver’s “Flute Song” whose lyrics “Sounds of loneliness are all the same” echo Nicky Hopkins’ piano acciacatura trainbell approximation further echoing mournful horns oohwahing along the tracks and the Marina’s foghorn hoot that would remind me of you if I weren’t already thinking of you nonstop.

The riff whips off the nightracing Amtrak rushing travelers to their midnight destinations, the riff blares from Southern Pacific’s clacketing cars laden with coal, petroleum, corn syrup, wheat, speeding across, over, through the land. I hear distance, the ballooning vowels split to the interval of a tritone, two moans uttered simultaneously but as far apart as two sounds can get, echoing our parallel paths unmeeting into infinity, two paired tracks never touching  but traveling side by side and further linked by furtive glances that sting like razor slashes.

Night song. Moving inexorably towards death. Funereal Ellington reed dissonances wailing always inexorably away. Lullaby for a depressed insomniac. Wraiths, phantoms, worse than pure strangers to each other, such ghosts thicken the night. Black absence the pillow I embrace, submerged in lucid darkness, whose dreams are futile songs.