The Owner of the Night
interrogates whoever walks
this shadow-lane, this hour
not reserved for you: who
are you to enter it?
Orion’s head over heels
above the road, jewel-belt
flinting starlight
to fuel two eyes looking
down from the air:
beacons in reverse,
since light pours in
toward her appetite
until she wings her noiseless outline
between our rooftop and the stars,
over this door and all the doors
hidden in the grass:
dreaming voles,
firefly province,
wasps in the palace
they’ve hollowed under the hill.
Mole resting his face against his splayed hands.
Perch, blink. Pose
the evening’s question
to the sleepless
while the moon if there is one
scatters islands
on a field of ink. Who
maps this? The owner
of the night looks down
to mirror and admit the hours
before the upper vaults
begin to lighten and recede.
Did you hear what I said,
a face looks down from the night?
Did who hear me? Who
reads this page, who writes it?
Copyright © 2017 by Mark Doty. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I spend about half my time in the city, 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 just raking, or weeding, or looking at the sky 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.”
—Mark Doty
Mark Doty
