I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
- Robert Frost
It was raining that night, also, that night I stood under the awning of a shop whose name I no longer remember, though I stood there for hours. Under another awning, two doors down to my left, his voice pitched to carry beyond the rain, was a street poet.
Unlike so many street peddlers, this one was a crafter of words; careful, elegantly cadenced. Among his own works there were those of the masters, and I found I enjoyed listening. There was nothing else extraordinary about his manner at all. Other than the small box on the sidewalk beside him, which I learned contained hand-written copies of his poems, he could have been anyone passed by upon a crowded street in the full light of day, anonymous and invisible.
Here was one who had lived his life entirely below. Here was one who could have been speaking only to me in the midst of that crowd, though there were only the two of us lingering there in the small hours before morning. I thought in the manner of his being, that I was merely incidental as an audience, and that he would as happily recited with none but the rain to hear him.
At last though, that remarkable voice tired, and he reached to the pavement for his box. Pulling his hood up against the slackening shower, he turned to go. Other than his recited works, he had not spoken to me at all.
I found myself hesitant to let him go, without some acknowledgment.
"How much?" I asked, indicating his box. There had been one of them…a work which could have been written especially for this encounter, and I would not have been surprised if such was so. I asked for it, and was pleased to find there was indeed a copy in the box he carried.
He asked only a single gil, but in the distraction of a passing car's splattering, I managed to slip him a hundred.
That poem has been my companion through the years; through many other rainy, empty watches. The poet called it by another name, but I think of it as belonging to too well to we who are known Below as the Blue Death; we who walk in the darkness of a blue suit far more often than we ever did in the light.
We who are acquainted with the night.