Sound of the night

The sleet is beating down — the sleet is beating down — and the dark is pressing in tight around the house now. It’s a dark that’s almost liquid, wet and bending around corners, peering. There’s a pool of light from an office lamp, constantly burning back the dark’s edges, keeping me safe.

And John Prine is leaking in, too, leaking in through the cracks in the house that the insulation somehow doesn’t fill, notes running high and then falling low like the ambulance siren in the night distance.

“Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery, Make me a poster of an old rodeo, Just give me one thing that I can hold on to,

To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”

Say what you will. Say that this is just a semaphore whose line of flags can mean nothing to you — that’s all right. Say it’s a dot-dash code that’s somehow three beats short of full Morse. That’s OK, too. You can stop reading here, start composing your tart and slappy retort. I don’t care — I guess I’m not talking to you.

Because maybe you don’t know what I mean — I understand that. But those who do know, well, they do.

“Just give me one thing that I can hold on to,

To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”

Below Portugal Cove South, I once saw a line of caribou rise out of the ground cover, look straight at me and run as one, their faces pointed out straight, because all that mattered was where they were going.

Near Adam’s Cove, I remember my face meeting a winter wind that seemed to have been running for miles just to touch me, glance off my face and run on, just so I could turn and watch it run, driving swirling cones of ice crystals ahead of it.

In the lee of Small Point, I found a great beige ring of wool around a sheep’s skeleton, lying there bare on the barrens, looking for all the world like it had stopped, planted its feet and simply exploded.

“When I was a young girl well, I had me a cowboy,

He weren’t much to look at, just free rambling man,

But that was a long time and no matter how I try,

The years just flow by like a broken down dam.” Hell, yes. The sleet is beating down out there, an icy rain falling down in ropes like cables in need of anchors.

“Just give me one thing that I can hold on to,

To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”