Your gray hour

In the world's approaching shadow,
from the sliver sun dusk,
wind flutters its pigeon-down
across your skin.

Only in this fleeting hour
does your migration's path ride
currents of air
with everything soon to dissolve
in the night.

Collisions at bedside

Twist this metal frame around;
if this is the closest I come
to being held,
at least let time slow let
physics twirl
as they may.
Implode glass;
if this is a story about stars,
let sunlight twinkle, twinkle,
across the shards,
and let your voice
be a soft narrative arcing wind.
Life driving toward some kind of
contact
any kind of
contact, violent
contact.
My favorite part is when our hands touch
and as I drift away you ask,
What would you like me to read tonight?

Oral mother sky parable

The cloud looks like dry ice over the moon,
and this you say is your proof God is a tweed-
suited mourner with a pinwheel hat. Well, fine,
I'll say.
Someone better tell Him to wise
up.
Now the cloud
slips,
the moon
nude.
And you say, That
ain't no man's silver
tit.

Nighttime pulse

Wide-framed pit bull spooned beneath my arm. My fingers pressing her scruff, white. A curtain blocks the moonlight. Dark cakes the bed--me, my wife, the pit, the Catahoula Cur balled at our feet. Blanketed in sleep, except me, who can't distinguish sleep from death. Present from future. I imagine the pit's skin already cool, all the cells in my body replaced, ten, twenty years from this bed. I imagine my restless, empty arm. For a moment she stills, a timeless moment, when I wonder if she is dead or alive, fingertips brimming with quantum potential. Eulogies form on my tongue, but before I can utter words the pit's head launches up and she is barking and growling at the curtained window. Both the dogs are barking, so loud now that their screams echo from wall to wall. Someone has arrived home late from the bars, scuffing past our apartment window. Their violent noise stirs my wife. This is how life is distinguished, I realize, and I have never been so glad to shatter.

Anatomy of a sleeping man

Some nights are a jacket as thin as the hairs on your arm, cold moon-silvery wind stabbing easily through. The first dawn you watch alone is a speckled wood frog, her organs petrified in ice since first snow, thawing pale green under the sun in April. Your last day will be too warm for coats, and the frogs' croaking will stuff the windless air, and the moon will hang like a discarded eggshell, hollow cell memory, the ghost of frostbite. Dreams are like that. Black fingers, a silhouette of touch.

A great depression

Ticker tape parade for our boys come home, an embrace in the debris like paper ash falling from upper floor offices. Wandering the streets in a predetermined pattern, and then gone, the pavement still warm from boots and the sky like cooling flesh. In their wake a fallen comrade, a stockholder fallen from an upper floor office window, a leg of his dress pants riding up his calf beyond a silk black sock's cut. How the sock spoils the mood of a homecoming parade.

Blue collar militiamen gather in the hills

Coffee settles on the blood like vultures on a tightrope. A shadow of a boy's heart steeped beneath the black bitter, confusing love with boiling. Like a cloudy night, a ghost of stars around the edges, industrial town sheen on the dirty brown sky. Black swallowing mineshaft, not the wing-spanned scenario the canary had imagined herself in but shit, an honest living. Potential collapse always vibrating the veins, that sense of an elevator sinking, clang, clang. Confusing fear of the dark with the dirt in your lungs.