Night Music by John Clellon Holmes

Author:John Clellon Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

Premonitory July

After the flood or fire or deadly cloud— whatever it will be this final time— if anything comes back, little animals will— to go about the natural business of what’s left.

We can’t last forever in our blinkered pride, our hard eyes and abstract words in which no hint of humility in the face of nature remains, no residue at all.

But little chipmunks will come back,

rabbits pausing like garden statuary,

nostrils whickering as in a trance;

all manner of birds and stoats and moles come hack

little creatures whose only counterfeitness

is a certain caution in our presence.

We can’t last forever here, but grass will grow, nuts fall, be gathered, grow, and fall again, the true business of reality recommence amid the vast irrelevance of our images.

But then it’s too easy to be Chinese these days, and they’re all Western now—we’re them.

Some sort of sad justice in that irony . . .

The death in us may die too late.

—1961

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