PAD 3

Location

how do you wait for it?

how do you open yourself to it?

where has it been 

or what?

The poem has been out all night.

It sped off when it became clear

I had no intention of attention

sometime after midnight and I, in bed

with an old lover, was only within his arms distance

in no way listening 

for another whisper

another reaching

another dark highway

and so the poem, spurned,

spun out off the soft shoulder of the slick levee road

and broke into all its letters

and its sense to itself was lost

and hurt

but there was the moon

and the moon binds us

vowels to sounds

arrangement to sense

difference to satisfaction

and before dawn the unloved poem returned.

It emptied itself in through the window

slept in jumbled phrases on the couch 

covered in the mud of the world, shivering,

home (I think) belonging there

next to a splay of white carnations

some brown or browning

some still full and soaked with moonlight

Or,

the poem, another perhaps,

was flour in a jar then

nothing, not much,

held, contained

powder white

In the dream I call out for her.

The location is a giant warehouse and the color slips

from warm-bright to grey.  Cool greys.

No one is there.  Though she is, somewhere.

Pallets of shelving and plumbing and parts stack up

high overhead, leaning, and I call for her.

This could be death.

This could be a poem.

Or a message.

The world waits in the dark for color,

for water, attention, use and order, reorder.

A kiss. A saying of words.

Placement.

Designation.

Context.

Care.

It waits 

to be called into.

It yearns to call back from.

His skeleton pulls mine closer

as the earth turns in such a way

that sunlight enters the room and puts things where they go.

And from somewhere comes a sound of gratitude.

And from somewhere comes an image for a poem.