After Mahler’s Songs of Night and the Earth
It is late summer fast changing into fall,
half-lit shadows at dusk, birds aloft
in the dying light before the pall
of darkness descends, the sunset soft
as the flames of candles flickering
through trees, tinting their leaves
oak orange, maple red while a breeze
blows through the forest with the sting
of October. Cicadas, katydids, crickets
lustily sing their last, raspy choral
music, its buzzing rattle like some skeletal
part scraping bare bone so sharply it sets
the nerves on edge as their dying cries echo
off the hushed walls of woods. What do they know
before we do about tomorrow? Of night songs and their call?
Granitic black beetles lumber under rocks. Ants
in tribes, white grubs, milky caterpillars,
slick footlong bloodworms. Twining plants,
creeping ivy, honeysuckle, wood fern, shrub junipers
threading in and out of brush land. A spider
knits its web among dew wet twigs that glint
in the moonlight. A snake, still awake, slithers
toward water. A creek ripples. There’s a hint
of winter in the air, like the glow of a forest after
first snow. Remember, a whippoorwill flying over
my head sings to me still, remember me, child,
when you’ve grown old and suspicious of the wild
places in your heart you thought you’d lost. Remember
what you’re leaving. Insects’ buzzing. Gusts stirring through poplar
trees. The rustle of night creatures intoning forever forever forever.
Spare Change for the Crossing, A Last Hike In, and A Last Look Back compose a trilogy of books, recollective in several senses and thematically intertwined, which Peter Weltner wrote in his eightieth and eighty-first years. He regards them together as his final book, a kind of culmination of a lifetime of thought and experience.