Night Edge
Waking to still darkness, dry-mouthed,
stumbling up for water and for gargle -
blackbird singing alone (in the thorn out there).
Now the long roar of an artic. tells me
we must be in the grey hour.
I peer at 'night' and though the West
is Prussian black, the East indeed,
offstage, in the wings, is prompting, infusing
the blackness with ghost tints
only distance-drivers* acknowledge,
and wakeful raiders, nose to glass like me.
As I fall back to sleep's ease I see
the bowl of night-edge, rounded there
with its black, its deepest blue, its whisper-grey,
lifted and placed on a shelf of memory,
by freckled hands I recognize as mine,
as if a moment might be a crystal weight,
held up to the ear to hear again the sure
unpicker of darkness divesting night
form unseen boughs in looped eternity.
................................
*thinking of the lorry driver, but aren't all long-shift workers distance drivers of the day?
.............................
YOU ARE READING
Bare Shouldered
Poetry"The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this - in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all [the] horror of a bare shouldered Creature...
