a sliver of
         moonlight
causes the buddah
to cast his long shadow
     across the garden


amid blown down
          limbs
of ancient maples
bare against the
     winter chill


the obituary
appeared in the Saturday
and Sunday papers
          with a picture
and a name
     i knew

1

          i must have missed something

all the neighbors have left
     their yard light on overnight
filling our woods with the
     insidious dull blue glow of
              mercury vapor lights

2

i stand in the yard among
          the sleepers but not of them

apart, distinct, set aside by
   my own inability to sleep
and now they have taken
         from me this too the night's sky
         
     has no stars

3

     the sun has sent us messages

across the reach, a reminder,
         a storm, a simple burst of
        
radiation, which spills across
the magnetic skin of our
   home, to light the sky with

ethereal glow, but hidden
         from me by these neighbors

with their mercury vapor

4
               fear of night

1

         do you remember the first death?

unlooked for
     when we are
unprepared, have no reason to wonder
what death will mean to anyone
         and the gripping power of grief

(or, the guilt, if you have no particular
              feelings of grief, at all)

2

         and the spring rain

as it washes the brownness of winter
     from the yard and into
the street, the gutter running with
          snow melt
the boys plugging the storm sewer
to make a pond in the dead end circle

          where they still play

i.
we spent the autumn day wandering
above the great river the woodland
of the bluffs as dusk fell, shots echoed down the
river canyon, we had completely forgotten
the deer firearms season had opened
down the old logging trail,
a glorious stag eyes wide with confusion
lurched from the wood

ii.
despite our noise, he stumbled ahead
down the  road, and toward the hunters,
we could not turn him into the safety of the park

iii.
as the black night descended we
were surprised by a glow racing towards us
a man on  a bicycle, brightly lit, not with just a
headlamp, but a whole string of lights,
wrapped around the tubes of his
bike frame, like a Christmas tree,
he nodded at us and rode past

iv.
as we sat around the fire back at camp,
silent, pondering the odd events
we had witnessed that day,
and the stag we had maybe sent off
to be killed by some hunter,
i wondered at the strangeness
of it all, this day, and all the days
like it, and all the days to come,
would they have been strange
without my being there to see them,
or, was the strangeness my seeing
              them,
and my being, at all
              stag, still, i am so sorry

i know without turning
     to look
that the school bus waits
         on the corner
for the neighborhood children
        
i hear the chimes
announce the open
     door

loosing forth life
     back into the neighborhood