The Field in August, After Rain

Now glory be to good
things singing around us
in the darkness, listen.

Listen: inside the crickets’
scalloped chirping, scrapers
trilling against dry files,

the grasshoppers rasping
from their stalks, the sticks
and thin strings of katydids,

cicadas drumming thickly
in the thick trees vanishing
into the throbbing dark,

we listen until we’re not
listening. Our ears fizz
with their electric persistence.

We do not care insects see-saw
In the hazardous guessings of sex,
Or that cicadas have churned

for years under the earth, or
that in the dark, large world
they are leagues apart, singing

to find each other, themselves.
The world is all alive
is all we know, something

thrilling the air, a murmur
reminding us of every
summer we remember,

something awake all night
which numbs, soothing us under.
Sleeping, or bodies cool.

Only the crickets insist.
Is it? Is it? they ask all night
and answer, It is. It is.


Listening, by Robert King


This poem reminds me of Thoreau's reflections on "the dream of the toads."


A day mostly spent driving in the rain and shopping for back-to-school clothes.