
What is left to add to the millions of words
in books of poems stacked on shelves around me,
as if by some osmotic marvel they might impart
a simple brilliance, a lasting, unfettered glow
that I might capture and travel the page by?
My early morning sojourns into darkness seek
reveries I can hear and feel with my hands,
well-apart from the blinding light of day,
that prismed cacophony of lies driven by
man’s ugly nature of greed and power.
I crave blackness under clouds and crisp
moon shadows in a breeze, redrawing
constellations from twinkling starlight
like the ceiling of the old Fox Theater
from where I believed Walt Disney fell.
The primal bellow of a bull or the prolonged
serenades of a hundred coyotes in the canyon,
January is a month in love at night. Closing
the distance between hoots, the owls
have finally agreed on a tree to raise a family.