As our metal eyes wake
to absolute night,
where whispers fly
from the beginning of time,
we cup our ears to the heavens.
We are listening.
On the volcanic rim of Flagstaff
and in the fields beyond Boston,
in a great array that blooms
like coral from the desert floor,
on high-wire webs patrolled
by computer spiders in Puerto Rico.
We are listening for a sound
beyond us, beyond sound,
searching for a lighthouse
in the breakwaters of our uncertainty,
an electronic murmur,
a bright fragile I am.
Small as tree frogs
staking out one end
of an endless swamp,
we are listening
through the longest night
we imagine, which dawns
between the life and times of stars.
Our voice trembles
with its own electric,
we who mood like iguanas,
we who breathe sleep
for a third of our lives,
we who heat food
to the steaminess of fresh prey,
and then feast with such
good manners it grows cold.
In mind gardens
and on real verandas
we are listening,
rapt among the Persian lilacs
and the crickets,
while radio telescopes
roll their heads, as if in anguish.
With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.
—
Diane Ackerman’s twenty-six books include bestsellers The Zookeeper’s Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, and The Human Age. Among her honors: the John Burroughs Medal, P.E.N. Thoreau Award, Stephen Hawking Medal, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and celebration as a Literary Lion by the NY Public Library. One of her books became a feature film, and another a PBS NOVA series. A molecule was named after her, dianeackerone, a pheromone in pygmy crocodiles.
