I live simply, raise no alarms.
Darkness flows around itself
as eyes stare past the green walls
and light glances off the single vase
in the center of the table
that holds no stems or flowers.
Night deepens without commotion,
tilts its roots into the room,
the world in sleep and second sight.
The table is covered with the heads
of matches, carefully arranged
in circles and lines, a dangerous plain
near the closed attic door.
I endure the shift of things,
watch a small brown spider
make its way among the
phosphorus stones, quicker
than a human hand, my fingers
tapping on the table’s edge.
It is centered on its spot,
threading through the rows
of matchheads as if some
needle’s eye or frightened wish.
Wind rattles the window glass,
blessing the ground
and surviving the ice.
I stay up half the night
awake in every nerve,
the promise of conflagration
in the dusted air.
The great wheel spins.
A match scratches across
the coarse plate, circles
aimlessly for a minute
in the streak of its pursuit.
The spider dances for
redemption on the table
among the yellow flames.
My fingers tap the edge in time,
nourished on tears and smoke.
*
You dream of a long hall, dimly lit,
where breaths flutter against dark walls,
a white moth drumming on a hanging bulb;
of a quiet old room with green carpets,
a barefoot woman anxious with love
stretched on a hard brown chair;
of an empty bed at the end of winter,
a black skirt laced with fine stitches
draped loosely on a faded rail;
of arms and thighs wrapped together
in secret, faces pressing tense on a rug’s
frayed edge, reflected in the pane;
of yourself, dry as salt in flutters of air,
floating through the ends of a bitter
earth and watching, watching.
These shadows mock the thin
disorder of the night, the paradox
of the zero and the one.
*
A small vine of light crawls
across the floor and snow freezes
on the window overhead, a needle
of ice forever pointing northward.
The old man leaning against
the wall reaches for the soft edge
of the universe or the mercies of time
that transfix the unmade bed.
He knows both will come when
the sun at last rises, cut loose for
a hundred years in the narrow streets,
the scar of a sad truth troubling
the careless door, but desires neither.
He’d rather hold the moon in his
hand as it sinks into its own light,
live forever in the soft rattle of summer
flowers, in a life that is not his alone.
But he knows, he knows, and turns his head.
The few stars that remain fuse to
stained glass in the upstairs room.
Shadows whisper of a kindness that may
come in the end, implacable and white.
Three White Horses will be published as a book in August 2017 by Lamar University Literary Press. It will include original ink brush paintings by Sou Vai Keng.