Late in the afternoon the light
at this tapering end
of Long Island not so much fails
as filters out the sun,
and in a month amid stances
restores the word twilight
to its original senses:
the day between, or half
itself, as when Locke alluded
to “the twilight of probability.”
But if at this moment I see
its application, still
the word comes hard, appalling me
in poetry: it sounds
too much like toilet, and Verlaine
becomes impossible
to translate, for instance, even
when the real thing happens
around me, as at this moment.
Should reality sound poetical?
I sit at the French window (why
else worry about Verlaine?)
worrying too about Robert Frost
who said either we write
out of a strong weakness (poets
love oxymoronic forms)
for the Muse, or we write because
it seems like a good idea
to write. As the day tapers off
like the island, I wonder at my choice.
Indeed, have I chosen? Outside
the open window, Max
the dog is staring in at me,
I can still see him, pale
against the darkening lawn, now,
for he is a white dog
that has just found out the difference
between Inside and outside,
the choice that always, when there is
a door, even a French one, must be made.
Thresholds for Max have lately meant
a problem: he lies across
the sill supposing, I suppose,
he’ll have the best of both
whatever world looms on each side;
why, as another French
romantic said, must a door be
either open or shut?
Max whines if I go to the toilet
and close him out for him the word toilet
clearly suggests the twilight, some
subliminal ending.
These French doors ajar (ah, Musset!)
merely frustrate decision;
and as the moments modify
each blade of grass, blossom,
bush and branch, suddenly showing,
in a light committed
to impartiality, yet
another aspect: the night side of things,
Max trots over to the window
where I sit wondering
if I want to elope with her
or just be good friends, more
like a brother to the Muse, and
gravely—I guess it is
gravely, in fact I’ll never know
shoves his white face against
the pane, nose flattened, of the door
and barks at me for being inside it.
But if I join him on the lawn
that is gray now, he will
only dash back to the table
where I have been, and bark
at me out on the silver grass.
The Muse indoors, or on
the road? Possessed, or befriended?
Choice is impossible.
Robert Frost is impossible.
Max and I know the truth, quite possibly,
that the light survives a long time
here on Long Island as
elsewhere, and then will come to terms
with darkness, and we call
the terms evening, our term for time
when neither power has
dominion, the air balances,
but just for now, and then
the odds are on the dark again.
Max and I know this too: it will be night.
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