Autumn days and nights thirteen centuries apart ~ Malinda Words

Somewhere, on a day like today or maybe even a morning, afternoon or night that is decked in very different colours, someone must have coined a name for that threshold, neither-here-nor-there moment, that unmanned checkpoint that separates light and darkness.

Perhaps this very person or, who knows, someone else wondered if that was entirely true. Someone may have thought, ‘it’s not that the day yields the earth to night, but in fact it is just day and night traveling to an ephemeral rendezvous where they skin one another, re-clothe and exchange notes.

So, day and night rendezvous at dusk, let’s assume. What if we twisted the question a bit. What if we asked, ‘where does night at day rendezvous?’ Would dusk be the correct answer? Dawn is as correct, an answer, is it not?

It’s as though night and day, unbeknownst to one and all, spend their hours traveling from one point to another. They move from dawn but along two different routes, meeting only at dusk, only to trace their steps back to dawn, again along two different routes.

These were my dusk thoughts a few hours ago in this late Autumn in Philadelphia with a stiff wind issuing warning after warning — the days will get even shorter and my breath upon your cheek will sting. Day and night converged and as though this momentous and yet surreptitious encounter ought to be acknowledged, a light or two had been switched on. I knew it was late evening, but my thoughts strayed to some other planet-point where at that very moment, day and night in other avatars had proceeded in the opposite direction to meet at dawn.

How many encounters, altogether, I wondered, and not just of things related to light and shadow. Who was meeting whom and where? Was someone late and did it matter to the person who had to wait?

So much distance, so much fracture. So many embraces in togethernesses anticipated, realised and remembered. I walked indoors from a twilight which could have even been a dawn, only to be offered a book of poetry, ‘Selected Translations’ by W S Merwin, Poet Laureate of the US from 2010-11 and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

I don’t know what kind of machinations were engaged in by what kind of forces, but a random page offered me a poem by 8th century poet Tu Fu, also known as Du Fu, and considered with Li Po as one of China’s greatest poets of the Tang dynasty — Autumn Night.

The dew falls, the sky is a long way up, the brimming waters are quiet.
On the empty mountain in the companionless night doubtless the
wandering spirits are stirring.
Alone in the distance the ship’s lantern lights up one motionless sail.
The new moon is moored to the sky, the sound of the beetles comes to an end.
The chrysanthemums have flowered, men are lulling their sorrows to sleep.
Step by step along the veranda, propped on my stick, I keep my eyes on the Great Bear.
In the distance the celestial river leads to the town.

Someone, somewhere must be, I was convinced, writing a poem about a companionless morning, of restless spirits retiring to beds rarely visited by rest, of the light of a ship that will be extinguished soon, of sails motionless in an ocean of dead winds, of moon and starts ready to be unmoored from the sky, of men and women and children and other residents of our terribly scarred and yet forgiving planet finding their sorrows suffer from interminable insomnia, of skies that went unnoticed and rivers fleeing from the town.

Fifteen centuries have passed. One thousand and five hundred autumns. Thirty times as many dusks and thirty times as many dawns — the love of night and day outlives the immeasurable sorrows and unutterable bliss of lovers from that time to this.

There’s so much poetry that could have been written but was not on Earth, the Planet of Insomnia. This too came to mind as I read the words of the poet Tu Fu, nodded to W.S. Merwin, who I learned was a practicing Buddhist, and saluted ships that deliberately and carefully navigated around dusk and dawn so that lovers will not be denied the right to inhabit the poetry that their togetherness composed.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 279th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

01 December 2023

Autumn days and nights thirteen centuries apart

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