stars

Last night, feeling lost and desperate in my little attic room, I began to sing one of the hymns I learned as a young man in the city, a glorious anthem praising the deities one by one, which culminates in a rising chant joining our earthly voices to the choirs of immortals in a great burst of adoration for all the hosts of heaven.

Well, it was just my voice alone, at the beginning and at the end, and if the deities were listening, they gave no sign, unless it was the dog I heard baying in a distant yard. My 'instrument' is much decayed, and I could not make it all the way through the longer phrases without gasping, but after a while I fell into the rhythm of breathing that the lines impose, and was able to attain all but the highest reaches of the melody without my voice cracking.

This morning the stars are out, and although not all their patterns are familiar, I do recognize some constellations that I memorized as a boy, lying on my back in the field, those many nights when I could not sleep, repeating their magical names over and over.

The sky behind the stars is deep blue-black, a rich cloth over which brilliant jewels were scattered by a careless hand — the hand, it may be, of a languid youth or maiden in love, or dreaming of it.

Dear gods, I am that boy in the field again, or the young man just arrived in the city, drifting from one fantastic festa to another, as if all of life were like this, a dream just a little less glorious than the supernal metropolis conjured by that old hymn.

My voice was pretty in those days, if not beautiful, but it was good enough to get me work, and friends, and adventure. I had some vague sense of the historical moment, just then and just there, but only enough to be able to debate energetically with others who knew no more than I. Being young, we had no sense of the pressure of the past, nor much ability to imagine the future beyond the next engagement.

In my memory now, that time is a blur of brilliant colors, pierced by moments of fierce beauty, but these images are fragments without context, and it would be impossible to recreate any kind of sequence for them: I lived here, I lived there, loved this one then that one, sang this ditty or that psalm, but I cannot remember in what venue nor for what event. I recall great excitement, but not its occasion; deep sorrow, but not its cause.

Most of all, I remember the color of the night: deep shadows looming over radiant streets, the velvety shimmer in the darkened room with only two people in it.

Now the light is up, the sky is white, the stars are gone. I can see every ear of corn in the field on the hill across from me, and every mountain reflected in the lake beyond. A gaudy pink cloud trails like a long scarf from the neck of the tallest peak, and, in the near distance, one window gleams back at mine from the house beside the field.

I cannot stay here, of course. But I will take this moment with me when I go.