It's evening again, then it will be midnight followed by dawn, which many describe as arriving with a crack—as if someone tapped an egg on the rim of the horizon so the world could be goldened by its light or bathed in its viscous fluids. In a small house, everyone hears the first one in the toilet flush his morning tribute down the drain. I don't miss that. I do miss the way roosters in the neighborhood colored the trees with bright orange leaflets of their trumpeting. In that time, we believed the amulets pinned to our undershirts by our mothers would steady and protect us from sudden wind gusts or toothless men wagging their genitals in the streets. How do we know such precarious escapes were not indeed the result of someone's fervent intercession? Didn't we drink the powdered milk that came in cans from factories in Chernobyl, yet live without seeing our hair fall out in chunks or feel our insides boil like overcooked sausages? In other words, I am trying to tell myself the stones haven't all fallen into the gorge. I saw a circle of twigs in the arms of the maple and heard an owl take up its night patrol. A gull opened its wings like a woman shaking snow from her robe. What else can we do but write all of this down?
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.