Lumens

I. Cattail Pond, Dusk

Reed-stalks split the sun and splay its sinking
over trembling water. A plywood pier
slouches into rot, the ruin perhaps
of some industrious boy whose toy fleets
once proudly anchored there; propped on post-stumps,
boards mar a measured lap and briefly trap
shards of sun-glint in their wake-splintered screens.
Bulrushes at season’s end, top-swollen
and full of days, occlude the shore, obscure
the nearby curve of asphalt that wends half a mile
back (beyond this wild circle’s rim) toward
home. The crop-duster hum of mosquitoes skirts
mercurially past the ears; lobes hang,
plump with blood. Acrid in the day’s last blush,
the pond’s ichor slops underfoot, wets ankles
in their twilit retreat. Cars pass, and something snaps.
      I left my boyhood here, I think—not here,
      but some such place: in a tangle of weeds,
      crusted with muck, sunk under waves whose ebb
      once graciously lulled all ruckus to peace.
      As the years exhale, a light fails behind the reeds.

II. Larimer County, September

Montana wildfires blear the streets—a film,
thin with distance; wind-sifted smoke winnows,
and particulate ash, hung where night-gusts
howl in the in-betweens, suffuse the day
with a muraled quality. Somewhere near,
a chime’s hammered copper empties its notes;
the dull, fitful plod of its rubber tongue
sounds soft songs like dirges under the purr
of noontime traffic. Each mountain, aloof—
a grey-veiled apparition—troubles us
with its silent erasure. The birds still
the music of their voices, suspecting
thunder in plumes of strangely scented storm.
The sun’s eye like an open sore festers
in its westward descent to ritual decease,
smears its rays over a blood-tinted stretch of sky.
      Love of Earth is cleft to desperation—
      ever in it, something sad: longing in
      the well of which, steeped in slime (primordial,
      dreg-swilled depth), the fear of death wheels and swims,
      bids us vainly clutch at ends: the tatters
      Nature calmly relishes with painted lights.

III. 16th Street, Friday

Tail lights like socketed coals kindle pools
that crouch in streets, where gutter-steam drift
wreathes drain grates—clenched, shut like teeth, iron smirks
beneath which the city’s stone throats open
down, parched half way to hell. A sodium
glow rings walks with its fluttering halo;
something begins and ceases in the crazed
alternations of failing filaments:
their manic tungsten buzz recalls insects
as it mocks the stars. Like captive suns,
dim with age, little lamps embalm their lights
and flush the night with hazy radiance.
Neon beams stretch streetward from windows, mix
with the traffic signals’ clockwork—marching:
walk, wait, walk, wait. The city’s bright pistons
throb the dark, pulse pallid intermittence.
      What time is lost? What kept? What transmuted
      into ghoulish alien rhythms
      inside which this chaos of human circuits struggles,
      scrapes through the gloaming fluorescent hush
      to greet at last the smog-smothered light of morning?

(Pacific Review, 2018)