The weeds are spare creatures,
tall lines, with few spurs
earringed at the top,
more jewelry than hair.

They are taller than me,
reaching up from my yard to the deck.

The kitchen bulb
gives color to what it can,
a fluorocarbon corpse light on my face
and over the weeds.

Meanwhile the sky has collected black
and gray and bruise-orange
from all the lights like mine,
evoking a half-resurrection.

Weeds are bowled, even in the easy breezes.
And the breeze is easy,
like a woman petting a cat.

I must cut them down tomorrow.
They are taller than the fence.

Through the near trees,
I can see another hill
as maybe a surfer, or a seabird
resting on one wave

when it crests, can see the next.
It is smaller,
perhaps still in deeper sea.

I can pretend, because it is midnight,
that the air is a giant room,
houses cluttered on its floor,
and that the floor,
earth, is not just some hill
with thirty other houses.

A hundred other people
aren’t busily sleeping themselves
into their foundations,
with the fact of having bought a house,
weeded a yard,
agreed to a neighbor’s fence line.

The earth moves.
We know it moves;
I am sliding downslope,

grasping at my seat in great fear.