Richard, What’s That Noise?

No daydream: my invitation to the voyage
was issued on acceptable terms, our journey
taken after all; Tuscany lies behind us,
and here we are. What is “here”?
We are in Orvieto-or virtually: downhill
and up the other side, in Abbadia, where
the ruins of Cistercian dedication stand
but fail to stand for much more
than a first-category albergo,**
for the dodecagonal belfry upstaging
a cast of stars awarded more liberally
by May and midnight. Way up
there on its volcanic-tufa promontory,
il Pozzo di San Patrizio, ** as well,
spirals down a shaft deeper than ours is high to
“water remarkably pure”.
We walk around the Abbey property whose “pool”
is not yet filled for the season and whose pale,
by this massive darkness, we dare not pass beyond:
the night-watchman makes his rounds,
a white Alsatian mild at his heels, but who knows?
We stand, pointing like our ruins to the Duomo
illuminated tonight for the likes of us
God’s great barn, empty and bright.
And at this moment they begin, the nightingales,
so loud and so many that you touch me and ask ..
Noise! The natural history of nightingales
comes down to that! and from this:
“No bird hath so sweet a voice among all silvan
musicians: singing for fifteen nights together
when the leaves begin to afford them a shelter,
with little intermission
or none. So shrill a voice in so small a body,
and a breath so long extended, alone in song
expressing the exact art of Music …” Sandys,
Milton, Keats to Hollander’s
Philomel, nightingales sing with no intermission,
but now, only now, tonight in Umbria, a noise.
Back there on the cliff the black-and-white cathedral
glows, a glory at a glance:
our eyes answer to what they know, our ears to … noise,
the natural experience—and that is why
we can close our eyes and cannot choose but hear.
In our adjoining rooms, light
from that created passion overhead spills in,
and nightingales persist, noisemaking undismayed
by a barking dog, a car braking, then a cry
that rings out as if it came
from your room, or mine. Night and nightingales return
to ash, daylight sifting over our divided
beds, the Duomo gray against the dawn again: I
grudge the midnight’s easy gift.