Allow me the moment
before I open the blinds
for the impatient cats
who are waiting to see
the insistent birds rocking
suet cages back and forth
on their hangers as they work
for their meals.

Allow me the moment 
before the coffee maker kicks on
with bitter waft of flavor
and accompanying gurgle
to tell me that it’s time
and there’s work to be done
that will never be done
but that doesn’t excuse me
from settling in to do what I can.

Allow me the moment
before I realize I needed
more sleep than I got
but I need to stay up
and face the exploding world
with all the words and work
I possess, with every last tool
in my hands, to shore up
whatever might endure the fire
and flood that’s looming.

Allow me this moment
before the next one,
allow me my delusion 
that if I’m lucky or smart or good
on this morning in this life
rushing to conclusion
that what I do next
once I start this day might last beyond
the night that will certainly follow.
It’s what I have, all I have in fact;

Light Outside, allow me this.
Night Ahead, allow me this.
Whatever Offers Such Things, I ask:
allow me just this.

Frank sat in the back of the room
talking to someone named Kilgore.

Kilgore, he said,
you don’t say much.

Come sit and I’ll buy you one,
whatever you want. 

Kilgore, he said, how come
you don’t talk anymore?

There was a time
you couldn’t shut up.

There was a time
we would talk for hours

and who talked more
than you did back then?

Gift, we called it,
gift of gab

and drink would unwrap
the gift even more. 

Kilgore, Frank said,
what happened to us?

I can’t even see you
and no one can hear you.

You must have an opinion,
a piece of advice.

You must know something
you’re not telling me.

It’s Goddamned cold here,
and I can’t face it. Talk to me, Kilgore.

Call me up sometime and tell me
what you used to tell me, soft and low,

all the good things. Or shout it out
the way you used to, the way 

you used to bellow. Kilgore,
talk to me, man. Talk to me.

Frank sat alone
in the back of the room,

at a table by himself
in the stacks. All around him,

books and books
full of unheard words,

and Kilgore nowhere
to be seen.

The argument was
about a stone.

Was it a gravestone,
headstone, or tombstone?

It became an argument
about arguing.

An argument about arguing.
How best to proceed?

Continue to 
argue about the arguing,

or get back to the stone
of the moment?

In the interest of wearing
the ground around the burial

to a full circle
of bare packed earth,

we argued about
that — an argument about

arguing about arguing,
and so we roared on,

circling the headstone or
or gravestone

or tombstone or stele.
A marker that showed the world

where something had ended.
Where living had come to an end.

Yesterday,
the breaking moment,
time fractured;
today, the beginning
of the pieces moving
away from each other;
soon enough
the edges will erode
and never come together
cleanly again. As if
they were never 
part of a whole. As if
they were not related.

Yesterday,
the breaking of time;
today, the lighting of fires
on the shifting remains;
blazes and smoldering wrecks;
bonfires underfoot,
ground cracking, smoke
insistently choking off the sun.
As if the sun was not also
a fire. As if heat did not have
both light and dark sides.

Yesterday,
I broke. I looked into
fissures, saw fire,
and broke. I felt
myself being chopped and 
shattered and now the parts
fall away from each other
and the one on which I stand
is so far from where I was.
An explorer floating on 
wreckage, hoping. As if there was
any place, any fragment
where one could land
that would not be on fire.

Anywhere I go
I see movement from 
the edge of sight —
live dark blurs shooting by
across the floor or ground; 

nothing I can ever name
although indoors I sometimes fear
I’m seeing roaches, or mice,
or other beings shamed and shameful
by reputation; outdoors 

I’m less afraid than curious
although that’s ridiculous —
potentially what I’m seeing
fleeing me or speeding by
out here is possibly less familiar

and offers a greater threat.
Perhaps what I’m seeing
regardless of where I am
is something else again,
beings without name trapped here

and running for their lives
to alternate dimensions
where they are kings and queens
and heroes for their bravery
in facing me who for some reason

is privy to all this motion; also
I consider the likelihood
that there is nothing there, that I am
seeing things that don’t exist
and the landscape’s a mythology

of my own making. Maybe
what is moving is within me,
nameless and furtive, scuttling
like the memory of long-ago mistakes 
through my view then disappearing

until such time as I can capture them,
examine them, choose to hold them
or end them or release them.
I should be wary of where I step.
I cannot tell how hard they might bite.

for the end 
we took with us
what we had
even if it was not
what we needed.
we walked or crawled
toward light, or toward
darkness. some went
alone, some carried
another, some were
carried. we suspected
that once we got there
it would be a bad place
but we pretended
it would be heaven
in order to hold
the desire to keep 
moving and not meet
the end in the same place
we came from. such a failure
would tell volumes 
to those few who might
come upon us after.
what a waste, they’d say.
it is as if they never lived at all
or even tried to survive.
did they think they were
stones that would not break,
would just continue being
after the end had come? 
to have others think
such a thing of us
would be unbearable
so we gathered
what little we had
and moved for the end
as if it might offer a new start
or at least amnesia.
we moved, thinking
at least what we left behind
would speak well of us.
our legacy would be
that when we knew
the end was near
we moved toward something
though it was too late
and had been too late for years.
thinking that in
the best case scenario
maybe no one at all will be left
to speak ill of us.

This isn’t over
although it appears to be
almost beyond repair.

It is not over
although the bears
are falling into pits
and not rising up.
Not over although
an eagle dropping from the sky
misses the intended target and 
seizes a scrap of human
instead. Not over although
smoke is filling eyes
and lungs and discourse.

It’s not over
because this morning 
someone stepped out
groggy from heat and 
lack of sleep and 
filled the feeders before
making coffee,

and then waited to see
who would arrive first,

and recognized 
the usual downy woodpecker
and said good morning to her
as he turned from her perched
on the log full of suet plugs
hanging not three feet away,

the nonchalance of the bird
in his presence suggesting
for once, the possibility of
a future, offering a chance
at small, tentative relief
that maybe it’s not over,
not yet.

North of Worcester
driving toward storms
through mad copper dusklight

in state park woods 
sheltering beauty, demons,
Revolutionary legends, witch shadows:

those old settler myths
die hard. Upon reaching 
a curtain of rain,

that light softens,
tinges toward silver; then
comes a voice chasing

a spark in the clouds.
Anything under the trees
that wants to cause harm

will have to wait its turn.
Then again perhaps nothing
is malicious out here

and all the danger’s
in the head of
a beholder

who just wants
to get home
after a long day

and leave
all this history and
his personal ghosts behind

to dissipate
in the last silver light
under the colonized trees.