I don’t want to get started on such a nice night, but when I’m
standing out here and the security light’s blasting from the boathouse
over the way, incessantly headed my direction
as light does across water and I can’t see the stars only orange
bug-light and the nasty-wasp Jet Skis angled half out of the water
and who’s going to roar off on them at night anyway and I’m
without the big dipper or the little or the entire dark past
or the crawdads under the dark, and even swimming nude
is problematical in that glow that’s intended to mean I try to figure
what, here we are in the suburbs, maybe, because the dark’s
dangerous, and me, I like to walk out barely seeing my feet,
just flicking on a light at the end of the dock, not to go
too far, and then when it’s off I’m floating with only the upper
world breaking through in pinpricks we’ve given names to,
in our idleness or fear, but nothing like this tactless yowling
of light. Wouldn’t you think there’d be boundaries, like when
a car drives by rocking with bass and I can’t hear
myself think, wouldn’t you think there’d be some respect for
people’s secrets, invisible as they are, some acknowledgment
that the invisible’s worth something, that I’m here, that there’s a god
of some sort that picks up steam in the dark spaces, the more
dark, the more chance—so I try to turn my back to the light,
but is it awful of me now to remember Kraków, Kabul,
Monrovia, the yellow bombs in the night saying Kilroy Was Here,
to want to stand on this dock representative of my version
of history, declaring no more light, no more sight of Jet Skis
taking no risks with their noses in the air, wouldn’t you think
the dark would finally get angry, at least in my lifetime,
and I could watch the retribution, the darkening, that the stars
would begin to reach earth with their clear messages, that they
would have something to say after all that distance about traveling
through their opposite, doesn’t it seem reasonable that I would
want to stand on the dock and wait for them to arrive?