Whiskered nightjars, dusk’s whirring bull-roarers, purring, square-eyed beauties the color of charred wood, unscrew their lids, release spook, charm, a child’s captured junebug on the scented air. θελκτηρία: charm, spell, enchantment. Zone of stars. I hereby proclaim a new constellation: the girdle of Aphrodite, celestial goddess. (“Therein are fashioned all manner of allurements” says the Iliad of Aphrodite’s θελκτηρία, her “broidered zone”—“therein is love, therein desire, therein dalliance, beguilement that steals the wits even of the wise.”) Stargazing as lingerie fetish. Look up and all will be revealed. Experience the midsummer night’s enchantment of Aphrodite’s diaphanous garters.
What is “dusk”? No one can say for sure but it has a voice you cannot localize—the plaintive whimper of a nightjar, like the mew of a kitten hungry for milk—but can nevertheless feel on your exposed flesh as if it issued from a cardboard toiletpaper tube. The brush of nightwings against the skin. It flies on marionette wings like a crippled spider, as if double-jointed. Its spindly, bent pinions are marked with white moon-squadron insignia. It manages astonishing feats of spatial agility in aerial love-dance with its prey, small winged insects. A quite extraordinary chicken dance with broken oars. I call it by its European name “nightjar” because at dusk the barky fingers of the trees unscrew the lid on something magical and nightfall comes out. A mere can of whoop ass is a can of derision in comparison to this consummate performance. Night itself issues from the nightjar. Isn’t beauty always jarring, queen of smoke and darkness? Nightfall is no novelty gag. Bust open another can for us tonight, inky darling. Hold still till then dear, on a gnarled branch, in your blanket of scorched-bark feathers.
July 6, 2015
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