Palimpsests Poems

Summer Nights

I recount the nights of faint, distant glows —
the dimmed party lights of summer —
of silenced streaks of fleeing light, tassels of clouds
adorned in fleeting whites,
on the broad balcony of the west, when the
incidents on the large vestibule of the sun sum up
their lives and times on seasons’ palimpsests.
The wild party closes by the stretch of the twenty-first hour.
Darkness, frightened, creeps in with the stealth of a departing thief,
the coyness and diffidence of an undocumented harlot.
Twilight aids the shut eyes of young irreverent bats;
drunk with summer's furiously spouting liquors,
like the denizens of an unclothed city, they fly low,
with gambolling wings, propelled by unseen strands of evening gales,
shadowing briefly the glints of pimping stars eager to witness the next day’s
orgy.