More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star

               Let me be no nearer*



After The Hours
let’s find our way—
From the greens
to the walks
and up the long streets,
like giddy children;
naïve and visceral.
               Let’s find a way to
               be in, in it,
               Starry and distant
so we can pretend
we’re not noticing her foaming at the
edge of the sand.

               The glacial street faces and glassy traces
      all amok—

All struck by our buzz;
open wide the rotted door
fuzzed with molds and
peeling lesions—
               And the incision
               leaks the glow-ing
               of inner-workings,
pulsing with all the light
of an oasis, of an asylum.

      Besides, there are faces
on the television and singing
from the radio telling us that our
               lives are here
and staying—our headaches
should go away—but they ache with
      so much wonderful pressure, like a
               clenched cradle
in a smiling and contracting halo.

Let us find a way to sleep,
a way to scale the dawn so steep.

And when morning scrapes away
night’s handsome features,
so we awake to fear of losing something
we were quite sure we had—
Or at least alarm at failing
to recognize its face.
               And to know it’ is real;
               animate,
               is to be assured
of who to write for,
who to tell
         all the things we now know to say;
  we really need it for the dark.

      So in the hours between Hours
the cunning man will warn against
putting the minutes in order.
He says:
               “this,
                your consolation
                is one burst
                afraid of the next
                momentment.”
Let us find our way from dreaming
to the other kingdom,

hoping I
can face faces with
eye to eye.