Night Walk

Maybe the eyes are only just at night, if they can be just at all
when open. Maybe everything seen is seen again, but not now.
Now, what’s fixed moves, and what moves
isn’t there. Now, as trees sliver in their roots, the limbs
dispense another remedy for shallow breathing. Far off
there’s barking, and then it’s gone but there
as when a sharp pain in the chest subsides, or the land & the sky
trade places. It’s clear that dirt is blood’s remix, that there
is space available, so many square feet,
but whether the smilax & chokecherry wire some divinity,
whether the wires escape their conduit, like bedhead, or a visual
of the kingfisher’s manic chatter, is less clear. The dark’s weird;
to say the pokeweed berries grow wiser,
for instance, or that the elm becomes a segment of Solid Gold,
each limb a toll way of throb & sway
where memory is the DJ, spinning the vinyl of what comes next,
is so much thanksgiving traffic.
But here we are
watching the moon’s humors dilate
with each passing cloud, watching the mountain laurel do its best
to be bamboo.

Thorpe Moeckel
Night Walk is reprinted from Making a Map of the River (Iris Press, 2008).