Catoctin Lullaby
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Boys, it’s time for bed. I know you loved this day so much, and that it was, of all grey days
a perfect grey day, that there were so many stories and such sky, while sun still lit the candles in the woods, still made
song of the uncertain rain. You’re sleeping now. I listen to the frogs, voicing their short cry
in pips that sum to one continuous rise of sound that just keeps rising: if it were light, or if we saw in sound
like bats or dolphins do, as light it would seem like rain falling up, and like rain circling the surface of a pond,
all at once and everywhere, a phosphorescent wake, some circumambient whalesong strung through the branched wrack
of the understory, inordinate and bright, a flooding sound still rising up, still roiling, still ringing and uncurling, netting,
refracting, rippling in each arch of elm and beech, branches flecked not in dusklight but in some sea-sung dream, [End Page 68]
a dream, boys, I’m sending you over draws coursed with streams and rivulets and notched with the shadow of the failing
hemlocks, over the soft rock faces hidden under hickory and oak, over cabins in meadows and the matte patchwork
of farmers’ fields. I’m sending this lit night into the city, where it will blend into the traffic of the river of the rain
and find some route to your indistinct room, Plum street, Oak street, Hophornbeam, and wait there in the ceiling’s fraying corners
till you wake, fitful, from a blue-green dream of waves, of lightning bugs, or of your dad, lost in the woods, and then the timber
of this soundlit place will sift down, sough down, and find the shadows in your room, and fill them, and you will know that I am here
in these woods, in just such a dark as yours. Boys, I know I am not home to chase you to bed, or come quietly upstairs
to check the sweet freedom of your sleep. I know nothing will remain of this in memory but that we were
without each other, stripped of lullaby and story, separate in whatever glory the world perpetually lets fall. My boys,
I know that I am losing time for you to be too young to know me gone from home. [End Page 69]
Luc Phinney has worked as a carpenter, contractor, site engineer, landscape architect, architect, poetry lecturer, and parks worker. His designs for buildings and landscapes have been completed in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming. While living in Montana he designed and built, with his architect-wife, a house made from the boles of firs, steel, and travertine. His first book of poems, Compass, received the T. S. Eliot Prize and is forthcoming from Truman State University Press.
