The Nightingale’s a Literary Bird

. . . here there is no light,
Save what from Heav’n is on the breezes blown . . .
                    –John Keats

What other’s ever cozened poets quite
like this one—always elsewhere, scatting away
in thickets cast with gloom? Moon dark or bright,
they hear it and they call on it to stay,
decocting what-all of its old grief may
be left—as essence of a nighttime rose
unfolding for the Hippocrene-ic nose.
Sylph-like syllables compose a word
our warbler in and of itself bestows—
the nightingale’s a literary bird.

Songs are airs, and melodies take flight,
wheeling, light-wingéd hatchlings of mid-May,
on course without a beam of earthly light
through every verdurous winding mossy way.
Song’s light’s from heaven, rimesters like to say.
Songs string wild note-posies: poems pose
truths too liminal for boorish prose.
(This might be thought weak-minded or absurd,
but Philomel has heart-truths to disclose:
the nightingale’s a literary bird.)

Or a song’s a lusty flower, day or night,
and nighttime flowers sing again next day,
reverberating in the soul (it might
be said, if soul there is—or, anyway,
the heart) as, say, an ode or roundelay.
A song, just like a flower, blooms and grows.
It pulses, which is how its blooming goes—
a pulsing of the soul to heavenward
on suppliant wings. It’s true, we all suppose
the nightingale a literary bird

piping faerie anthems: heart-ache flows
and ebbs till chanticleer puffs up and crows.
It is a music every poet’s heard
at night, whereby he—or else she—but knows
the nightingale’s a literary bird.

“The Nightingale’s a Literary Bird” first appeared in Westward Quarterly.

Along the Shoulder

A buck’s dead here about eight hundred feet
from where that little girl died down the road
last year, shoulder-strapped into her seat
spooning a cone, or something à la mode
with whipped cream—sugar’d—strudel dough’d

—whatever you’d imagine—when the truck
hit them. Last night, I guess, this gorgeous buck
leapt out into the lane, mad for night air,
knowing nothing of what we call luck,
good or bad, or happiness . . . nightmare . . .

The dog applies her nose to it by way
of reading it, its death, its breathlessness,
having no other impulse but to stay
sedulously at it as the press
of traffic hurtles past—she doesn’t guess

at anything, breathes everything, so what
she knows is it alone—I think that, but
I also think its beauty, think the pain:
her little eyelids pressed three-quarters shut,
the gurney waiting in the turning lane.

Terence Culleton has published poems in a variety of journals, including Sparks of Calliope. He has appeared on TV and radio shows in Philadelphia and New York and several of his poems have been featured on NPR. Mr. Culleton’s third volume of poetry, a collection of sonnets entitled A Tree and Gone, is now out through Future Cycle Press and has been included in the New York Review of Books Independent Press “New Releases” list. It’s available at Amazon or through his website: terenceculletonpoetry.com, where you can also purchase his other two books, A Communion of Saints and Eternal Life.