Dear muffled, mournful hum

that wakes me just past midnight, are you
the foghorn pressing through milky shrouds
that keep the sailors from their course?
Are you the breathy, unpunctuated paragraphs
that coal trains write, their fugitive
dust sifting through pines to mantle
porch floors, stepping stones, and window-
sills? In the darkness, how every sound
enlarges, merges— then peters out
under the bridge, after the blast
and skittering refrain an isolated firework
makes against the metal flanges of a pipe.