The hermit thrushes sing all night in summer.
By winter they must be exhausted and relieved
to sleep all day. Was it territory or sex that gave them
voice or was it just the thing they could do so they did it?
The humpbacks lunge feed, their great black heads
scooping the water’s surface like bulldozers grazing
the land and then they roll, flipper to sky, twisting
their lumpish bodies in the dance of appetite,
some of them testing their limits by throwing
themselves into the sky and falling back to plunge
into the sea. Gulls and kittewakes moil overhead,
a big dance hall partying in the pink alpenglow
of a June midnight, sun sliding behind a volcano
but the sky has won over the night and refuses to dim.
—
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of six books of poetry and five books of nonfiction, most recently A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, & The Sardine Dress. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. She recently received a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation, which sent her to San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.
