Night Comes On

by Jim Bishop

Night Comes On
Now I look for her always, I’m lost in this calling
     I’m tied to the threads of some prayer
                            Night Comes On, Leonard Cohen

                                     -1-

Maybe he chanced to look up in that suspended moment
before the dark closes in and saw then something like
heartache something lovely as our simple word for it

soft blue, pearl and pink, at the horizon above the
wooded hills, a thin bank of purple cloud. dusk, we say,
dusk, the final soft k barely vocalized, after which, silence: nightfall.

                                     -2-

true a kind of night had fallen had befallen him
without warning along the way should he not have
felt the darkness gathering not heard the music

fade the music he had taken as his own as much his story
as the threads he’d thought were woven fast into a single
strand say he had lost sight somehow

of the darkening around him say an unkind silence more
an absence unbeknownst till then had set in till it dawned
on him at last, he was lost.

                                     -3-

Lost. how the word itself closes in becomes its own dark
night the trees in extravagant motion, no moonlight through
the creaking branches where, in thrall to Daddy’s long collapse,

protective pronouns fall away it’s me not he who trembles to
declare myself a spirit with my mother’s voice, the voice of
Eros really, life itself, breaks in, taking her language from a song.

Go back, go back, she says, Go back to the world.