A Debate

My friend Peri and I have had debate going on for awhile about the virtues of night people verses morning people. Though not really an argument, it made me wonder why some people tend to have loyalty to a time of day. I've long been telling friends that my least favorite time of day is noon, or whenever the sun is highest. I have no idea why--I think it may have something to do with the fact that color seems to me to be at its most washed out in the full, shadowless sun. There are exceptions, but as a general rule, I like the hours of transition best, when the light is moving, and most of all, the hour then the sun is rising. I have some friends who call the hour before sunset "the golden hour" because of the quality of light at that time in the mountains. They usually choose this hour to drink wine. What a good tradition! I remember when I was in high school seeing their mom in the front yard of their house, standing undeneath a tree with a glass of red, her hair caught in gold. I could go on, but let me just say that for me, to be walking around Edinburgh when the first orange light is hitting the rooftops and the towers is something else. Only the sea gulls stick around this time of year, and there's nothing to be heard but their high-up cries and the labored engines of the buses. I walk in the gardens and the sun comes up behind the huge bank building and the houses along the Mile. It leads almost inevitably to prayer.

        Anyway, the time difference between here and St. Louis provided Peri and I with a unique moment the other day. I was up pre-dawn, when the horizon was grey, and I noticed she was logged on to Skype. She was up, it being 2:30 am her time. So when we spoke, we were both at our prime hours. Our hair was messy, and we talked about books and Dani and distance. It was almost like time-travel. I've never been so struck by the wonders of the information age--go humans: I can be up late and up early at the same time.
        This, of course, generated a poem, into which the corn field behind Dani's parent's house in Michigan somehow also sneaked. See what you think.

Quiet Table
for Peri

Those who love night
and who love morning
love the same thing:
the silence that is heaped
on the edges
of the day,

the snow turned aside
by long hours of speaking.
And in the house, the table
with its blue cloth—or is
it winter light? where they sit
listening, sure that their parents sat here

before doing the same. Or are they my parents,
and am I listening? Still, there’s
always the table with a cup
barely warm, and ashes
in a dish that are the same
as worry and time.

There, whoever it is
that’s listening has to decide
if the snow is clean
or blackened, and what,
out of all this speaking,
we have made.

And does it compare with
the calm of a blue field
untroubled by the sun,
and the deer printing
from the woods on its east,
carefully, to those on its west?

picture: http://images-3.redbubble.net/img/art/size:large/view:main/2858013-2-empty-coffee-cup.jpg