Most of us think of night as a pause: dinner ends, lights go out, breakfast waits on the far side. D. L. Emblen's "Between Times" quietly dismantles that assumption. While the people of the beach towns sleep, the bay beneath their windows is at its busiest, a crowded, hungry, frightened world that never rests. The poem's central idea is the gap between two ways of experiencing the same place: the human version, in which night is peaceful and empty, and the creaturely version, in which it is a time of vigilance, feeding, birth and death.
The poem opens in the human world, and it is a lovely one. The lights of Ocean Beach are "ruby and emerald and diamond," then darken "like a pile of cooling coals." The jewels-to-embers image is warm and domestic, and it sets up the comfort the poem will later question. Even the surf is described with a small paradox: "somehow more distinct at night, yet strangely subdued by dawn." The word "somehow" turns up again at the very end, and the echo matters. In both places it marks a feeling people accept without examining it.
Then the camera, so to speak, dips underwater. Emblen counts in millions: "a million vari-colored clams," "a million other creatures." The numbers are playful and a little dizzying, but the verbs are what carry the weight. Clams "hold themselves open on taut muscles"; creatures "move about / or hide / or silently die or give birth." That short line-by-line list, with its repeated "or," treats death and birth as ordinary events in the same breath, no more dramatic than hiding. The "complex mouths—snail mouths and anemone mouths" open and close in what the poem calls "the fluid atmosphere" of the water. Calling water an atmosphere is a small, clever shift: it asks us to imagine the sea floor as a place with weather and air of its own, not a backdrop to ours.
The second stanza darkens the mood. The incoming tide "brings a freight of food and fear," and that phrase is the poem's hinge, since food and fear arrive on the same cargo ship, inseparable. Predators are catalogued as "creatures with multiple jaws, spears, claws, darts and needle teeth." The list swells with weapons, almost as if the animals were armies. Yet the poem keeps returning to eyes and mouths, to creatures "seeking food and watching for enemies." Everything here is both hunter and hunted. The long final sentence of this stanza piles up locations and verbs, "open and close, chew, ingest, thresh the water with short feelers, retreat and attack, dig holes in the bottom mud, drill holes in shells," without pausing for breath, so that the reader feels the ceaseless crowded motion the poem describes. The "nameless ones" are never identified; the word "nameless" quietly admits that human knowledge covers only a fraction of this life.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no regular meter. Line length stretches and contracts to suit the subject: short, startled lines like "or hide" sit beside long, rolling ones that spill across the page like the tide. Without rhyme, the poem relies on the sounds of the sea itself, the soft sibilance of "silently," "slivers," "silver," and the clipped, hard consonants of "claws, darts and needle teeth."
The ending is the sharpest move. The people "lie there listening to the surf roar, / smiling to themselves, like children, / somehow secure in the myth of peaceful night-ness." The coined word "night-ness" sounds almost childlike itself, and that is the point. Emblen does not scold the sleepers; he simply notes that their comfort is a story they tell. The poem's title, "Between Times," now carries a double meaning: night is between dinner and breakfast for people, but the creatures live in a time that is never between anything.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it changes how you hear a familiar sound. The next time the surf seems soothing, you may remember what it covers.