hang in the back of the closet.
I’ve saved them
from shabbiness
the way my daughter puts an apple aside,
the way my mother saved her best towels
for the very last.
All these years the dandies have worn
their Sunday best
out on Friday,
slender hands and shoes too nice for wear
walking down the street
untied at day’s end,
and don’t all days end alike
with dark and rest
and children’s prayers for life
rising up beyond the next
and next everything?
Night unravels
the calcium from bones.
Moths in the closet are growing
into dark holes they’ve eaten away
from fine shirts,
shirts empty of heartbeats,
all we should have lived for,
empty of arms that reach back
like a sleepless night, for what is saved,
behind plaster
to the old world in canyons
with blood women dancing on walls
to the earth’s drum
and the mother of deer and corn
so light the insects appear.
The invisible ones,
when we step this way
out of time,
are all around us.