A Poet Reflects

I can hear the water slapping
the white sides of the shore.
The boy stares out the kitchen window.
It hangs like a little square of cold before him,
a pane of shadow.  The night outside this shadow
is black.  The sea is distant.  The bird,
however I imagine it, sings.

—Paisley Rekdal, closing lines to “Nightingale,” from Animal Eye (University of Pittsburg Press, 2012)

“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley