The Night Call
The woods are dark
and important with green, restless
with a pushing wind bruising the white
petals of the moonflowers against
the walls of this house I never enter
that stands at the edge of the dream. I'm
not here to come in from the green dark alive
with a canticle of constellations and the wind strumming
soft in the moon-colored strings of my hair but
sometimes I watch the wisp of a dead bishop
rigid in the doorway holding the lantern high
questioning the heretic hours, the faceless rain,
the expanse teeming with life between us
that answers in crickets and owl song
and the giving language of pines
he will never be able to speak.
None of these will tell the secret; that I'm here,
that I'll never come in
to the house filled with traps,
whose convenience of hot and cold
running happiness has leaked
out in sickly anger, leaving that stink
of broken love that clings
to a dead wisp calling,
calling me back to black dreams
I'll never share again.
I'm already gone in the breathy night,
into the green dark, alive.
February 2022
posted for earthweal's
Photos © joyannjones 2-27-2014, manipulated
