[James Midgley]

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The Nightjar

In the end the two boys came to a cottage of stone,
a stream and a tree, and though they sensed they'd crossed
into the land of some shrikish neighbour who any moment
might appear at the sill of a high window like a redfaced vase
of roses, they knew the tree had made itself
for climbing and the boys to climb it. They footed up
the sunlight's stammering ladder, reached into nook and gap
that had been placed there perfect for their reaching,
all while the wind was a seething room which wouldn't take
them anywhere besides where they were meant,
each finger a dark-boned bird's tongue, each handhold
a collar stretched and muttered. From the midriff
of the tree they looked down into the muscled stream,
muscled because it ran dense with every fish imaginable:
buckled eels, mudlarked gold of tench, a stretch of salmon
huge and singular, and inchlings of every kind that swam
out of their young imaginings, and all of these not yet
were nipping, gnawing, conjoining with their roiling peers
as the water bunched its bicep. Further up they found
the roof tiles spread below like fledglings in an eggbox
and the highest window of the cottage still unmanned
and one turned to the other and said, Do you remember?
and trailed off, unsure as the other as to what came next.
There the bough hung heavy as a sow's suckled undercarriage
with every kind of fruit, though all of it was wasped
and rotted, all of it would soon tear the tree down with it,
though for now the branches had such strength, a climbing
strength, holding up their burden for no reason in particular.
With dusk arriving there came to the window not a man
nor woman but a bird, a nightjar they supposed,
though neither saw whether it had come from the old house
or from the falling sky. On long fingernails it seemed
to sit and sitting sang and the song was full of where
the boys had been before they could remember, a fleshed
blackberry kind of place, a singing at the end of thorns,
a holly leaf and bloodred bitterness, a snowy tabernacle
in which the cottage opened onto bird and onto cottage
and onto boy who, knowing what the song meant he must do,
hurled his lucky stone to kill it before the stone
could take on wings, could build a nest, could sing
the song the bird was singing from the darkened window,
before the darkened window was the sky it was.



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