Night Shift

The oldest fears are the last to go

like the pre-dawn dread

of a process as impersonal

and tribal as birth

or dream

when someone masked and familiar –

the absence in the cupboard –

reappears for that ancient night-shift routine:

to pry something intimate

wet and still unprepared

from an aeon of self-assemblage

something that should have known

that entrails must always aspire

to be asphalt,

that the unambiguity of day

was never meant to be trusted –

its promise of mountain wind and blue summer sea.

Then the servile cringe,

the desperate bargains of the diehard trader,

squawk,

squiggle of nerve and gut,

erasure of struggle,

before the civilities

of sun

and cereal

and the imperceptible click of the cupboard door.