One morning, back in the city after a camping trip to the high desert, I find in my inbox “The Owner of the Night” by poet Mark Doty.
“Orion’s head over heels
above the road, jewel-belt
flinting starlight
to fuel two eyes looking
down from the air.”
Camping, I often lay awake in my tent, my body on fire with listening for an ancient language—animals, weather, and who knows what—that both frightens and thrills me. On some nights the moon is so bright it drills through the tent roof and my eyelids. On moonless nights the stars are in charge, the Milky Way a gleaming smudge of road for those who can defy gravity.
Besides how his poem celebrates the night sky, I love what Doty has to say about naming and language: “I spend half my time…in a built landscape where one knows the name of just about everything; in this way it’s a city of language, a world mediated by words. The rest of the time I live in a place where sky and weather, plants and animals are as present as sidewalks and vehicles are in town. My inner process of narrating experience in words slows down there, even vanishes for moments at a time; then I’m…not supplying words for what I see. Thus it’s startling, at twilight, or deep in the night, when the dark itself seems to say a word: who. It seems the right question, the one the owl asks; as Stevens said of the harbor lights in Key West, that sound arranges, deepens, and enchants the night.”
I’m with Doty: there’s something about city living that makes me assume everything can and should be named. Out in the middle of nowhere, the Mojave for example, I also like to name: What’s that stunted resin-smelling tree? Who chipped that falling-man petrogylph into that rock, and what kind of rock is it, anyway? But there’s something about being out here, especially at night, that silences me. I shut up and listen for once. I don’t have an immediate reply to the howl of the wind, the call of the coyote, or the unidentified scritch just outside of the campfire’s light. The age-old fear of the dark? Not much to say about that, either. Better to huddle close to the fire, trusting its flames will scare away the nameless forces that scare the grammar right out of us. To wait until later, today maybe, to try to decipher what—or who—the night is trying to tell us.
Photo by David Webster Smith.
There’s something about being out here, especially at night, that silences me.
I don’t have an immediate reply to the howl of the wind, the call of the coyote, or the unidentified scritch just outside of the campfire’s light.