light

“I Sit And Listen To Gillian Welch As The Sun Rises” was going to be the title of a poem I had stringing through my mind, until I realized I was actually sitting on my couch listening to bluegrass as the sun was poking through the blinds. It took me a while longer to remember I’m not a poet, but by then it didn’t matter. The song had already worked its way through me, and I was watching the sunlight catch and grow through the room. And it was simply following the music which had been spreading from corner to corner of the house since I had wrapped up my work an hour or two earlier, a disastrously productive late night. But sometimes my work, like the songs we listen to, are lonesome and require silence to complete. I forget who described the early Kentucky wailers as carrying that “high, lonesome sound,” but they knew what I’m describing here. It happens every morning, though we let it go. It’s even too early for the birds; just a low, soft light across the fields framing the dark silhouetted trees in the neighborhood like veins, a shadowed aortal flow. There are no mountains here, but the same silences exist. All the earth shares in the vacancy of first light. I wish what I had to say was from poetry. I wish I had time to fold, spindle, mutilate words to match what I’d like to say all day. Even greater, I wish I knew what to say. But then, what I listened to this morning was evidence that people do. Perhaps a few others. And as Saturday morning occurs here across Ohio I sit and watch Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris sing a tune older than the couch I’m sitting in, older than Scout or myself and half the people in this neighborhood, and I’m drawn into thinking about how old things really are, and how long it takes people to really write what should be said about the oldest things. And don’t you know, darn it, but the birds started their first songs as I wrote this? The light pours through my windows now, all of them golden and alarming. I should go to bed. And I’m glad I got my work done, for one, but I’m even happier that I was able to be here and witness this dawn, which we so rarely see, full of music. And I’m glad for this old couch. And my dusty drapes. And I’m glad some old coot grabbed his gitbox one day in the backwoods smokey hills of Tenneseee years ago and slung his voice skyward. He too, like these dawnbirds, simply had something to say and voiced it low, high, and then quite seriously, into song.