Jared Smith

The Song of Crickets

There is a swamp out beyond the back deck of our house.  Not a deep impenetrable swamp, but of uncertain size.  I spend many hours watching it and trying to understand what resides within it.  Oh, there are deer of course and a few foxes that come and go.  I’ve seen more than one coyote ghosting through its vines in the early morning.  There are peeper frogs in the early spring that disappear come mid May.  I’m told there is a crystal clear pond somewhere deep within the shadows that form its interior, and I expect that is so since I can hear Canadian geese in the distance at times, and a great blue heron often flies over in the evening.  Small songbirds migrate through the bushes at its outer perimeter, and various kinds of hawks along with vultures circle above.  It’s pretty rural, wild, and unsettled for this part of the eastern seaboard. 

A mist rises from it each evening.  As the sun goes lower on the horizon, the shadows of the marsh reach, expand and the trees and vines and tangled roots are merged together with the horizon.  Often a pale light will glow in the distance almost beyond where I can see. It is at this time that the marsh grows luminous and infinite in its reach.  There are so many other things growing within it that I have never seen or been aware of. I am certain of this.  Not only the newts and salamanders that must be moving through its murky shallows, but the essence of life unbodied and lost within itself.  The song of crickets is often the last sound I hear before turning in.

 

Jared Smith's latest collection of poetry, The Shadow Box at the End of the Universe, was released by Stubborn Mule Press in February of 2024.  He has 16 previous collections, and his poems and commentary have been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies here and abroad over the past 50 years.