Night Song
a deep gravity settling in amid the trees.
There should be more than this, or less.
And so we watch the young lovers climbing
from their car with a blanket, starting across
the dark field toward the river, the sky rolling back
its eye to expose the moon. Often we see them
after dark, moving past the hawthorns colonizing
the field’s verge, the waxy fruit dropping to the earth
beyond the fence. Here are the hours at play,
the way you hear your name in a dream, though
whoever is calling is far away, like falling into
a well. And always the moon is manifold above us,
timeless but forgetful beside the glassy-eyed,
prosthetic stars, dumb as embers, this bed
of darkness rolling out from the heavens,
vacuous and sleeping, bruised and forgetful.
Come morning the car and the lovers will have
vanished, leaving only dust rising from the bar ditches,
moving in swirls and eddies: this commotion
the way a river carves into the body of the mud,
gathering loam and carrying it downstream.