Summer Dusk

I put in my goddamn hearing aid
in order to listen to a bird that sounds
like the side of a drinking glass
struck lightly by a fork

and try not to hate a life
that dips you in time like a teabag
over and over and pulls you up
each year a slightly different color.

Yet I like this hour when the air goes soft
and leaves stir with relief at the end
of their labor of being leaves.
“What a piece of work is man,” I say,

not knowing Hamlet said it first--
“how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,
in form and moving how express; in apprehension how like an angel,
and yet, to me, the quintessence of dust!”

This hour of the evening
with a little infinity inside,
like an amnesty from the interminable
condition of being oneself.

This half-hour when you look out
and see that it is sweet.
Even in my deafness I can hear
the bird whose name I do not know

speaking to someone in the dusk.

--Tony Hoagland