My horse's haunches sway,
Saunter up hillocks and down a valley path,
Above a ridge off and on: a village where some people fish,
Phosphorescent flotsam washed ashore.
Green embers breathe as if through shriveled lungs.
Wax in contrast to the gloaming dark that's coming on.
Shrubbery shadows lengthen, enlarging blacknesses.
Crickets ratchet down their temperatures.
The earth cools in wan mirage.
Time lapsed, the stars make
A slow, quiet carousel of lights.
It circles far above us disengaged.
Wings of crows scoop pools of air,
Then dive down open maws
On tiny, furred crawlers shocked stock still.
Crows chalk their caws across the night.
A copse will grow into a stand of oaks.
The vintage children like to climb.
Gnarled limbs reminding them of fiction sailing ships.
Hand over fist to where the topmost rigging is.
For now, people and trees are bottled tiny on a shelf.
At dry dock like some whittled models are.
Until the oak is christened keel and frame
And of agers live lives and make their livelihoods at sea. (9/18/22)
he had been without her
in the empty hotel bed for
two nights, two sweating
quiet blacknesses, without
shuffling or snores, or jittery
leg kicking; now all he wanted
was for the moon to leave him
alone and the neon outside in
the street to bury itself in the
deathly still of the tree lined
park, where the rats and weasels
and crazy cats foraged in their
merry hunt for things left over,
while the night, that trickster of
the seasons, rested in his eyes:
when he had first visited the city,
with its girls and bars and hot,
humid evenings he was full:
now he heard only the sounds of
angry crickets, drowning amid
the craters of the dying wounded
as he stumbled drunk past the
bed, the bath and the TV; would
this last patrol always be here?
Black raindrops race down the slick plastic coat
The muddy coal drops, fall one by one from the sleeve
That is empty.
The other hand, as black as the raindrops
Grips the sooty rail, attached to the sooty wall, of the sooty mine.
Black gold, chunks and dust, never quite settling on the ground
But on the hands and faces, and minds of the miners.
The empty sleeve’s arm
Lies in another mine a long way and time away
The man never smiles whilst down in the dark
For the dust does not permit any joy.
And when he cries,
No one knows;
For his tears are as black as the raindrops
Which run down his once-yellow coat.
His bone dry eyes
Have seen a thousand blacknesses
And have remembered every single one.
His arm in a mine far away
Still has a watch on the wrist (the Timex that his father gave him)
The hands have long since stopped moving around.
But, now, it matters not, for no one can see in perpetual night.
And now the man moves through the ink mist
Slaps his thigh, turns to the cage with a sigh
And rises to the laser-light day.
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