And then-- some wonderful crickets in Tucson--
a poem called The Black Jewel.
In the dark, there is only the sound of the cricket.
South wind in the leaves is the cricket.
So is the surf on the shore and the barking across the valley.
The cricket never sleeps.
The whole cricket is the pupil of one eye.
It can run, it can leap, it can fly, in its back
the moon crosses the night.
There is only one cricket when I listen.
The cricket lives in the unlit ground,
in the roots out of the wind.
It has only the one sound.
Before I could talk, I heard the cricket under the house,
and I remembered summer.
Mice too and the blind lightning are born hearing the cricket.
Dying, they hear it.
Bodies of light turn, listening to the cricket.
The cricket is neither alive nor dead.
The death of the cricket is still the cricket.
In the bare room, the luck of the cricket echoes.