A round yellow fury to the evening’s light,
though ultimately it shows clemency. Shadow,
you put out your gentian-lipped goblet
and the night’s lost sailors bumbled in,
a whole handful of them, squeezed into
those snug white pants.
Sorry. I mean
those were meadowhawk’s wings.
You long for places you shouldn’t go:
billiard halls, the pachinko palace,
behind the parked car where a Zippo flicks,
twice (sometimes you need to be summoned
twice), the places where no neon glows.
(And the you here is not so much you as it is I.)
I have this rearrangement to make:
symbolic death, my backward glance.
The way the past is a kind of future
leaning against the sporty hood.
On leave, he says.
He doesn’t say it, but you can see it:
flattop, civvies, shirt tucked too neat.
He is so at ease, you think. You think: at ease.
You only have between now and o-dark-thirty.
The swift birds amass.
They, too, drawn to the buzz
hanging on the cusp of dusk.