In The Gloaming

As Day succumbs to the persistent entreaties of Night
When Daynight becomes Nightday
That moment when charms and curses are best hurled
A moment when potions in the cauldron best swirl
The gloaming.

That momenternity when rules don’t apply
An open portal wherein all things can be,
When the ghost at the foot of your childhood bed
Was just your winter coat.
When the tree in your yard
Was a shaggy green demon.

Living stars flutter in the falling twilight
Persistent fireflies glow in the growing gloom
Flashing out their desperate SOS
Seeking that brief tryst before dying their work done.

We sit locked in our houses, trapped in our homes,
We've gorged on the electronic teat
We fail to mark the days passing from one kingdom to the other
The eternal cycle of welcome and goodbye,
An ending that is a beginning that is ending.
Equipoise.

Night knows that with the slow glow of morning
He too must flee to the west.
A billion repetitions seem an eternity
In the endless rhythm of the heavens.

Day pushes out over the great Pacific expanse
Bringing life/light to the islands scattered over the deep
Like diamonds on dark velvet

Day continues Her eternal retreat
Bringing abundant light but scarce heat
To the frozen Siberian steppe
Scattered across the tundra/forest
Like black blood spatter
The Gulags.

I Know A Man

I know a man who has a daughter. She is a woman-child, grown but unready. She is beautiful and bright, a father’s dream. It is an unsteady relationship. His father abandoned him and for a time her father abandoned her. He tries his best to do right. Raw, she struggles to set her own course but runs aground again and again.

Well into middle years the father struggled to steer. He sought a sure current but his battered, tattered sails tore in the blow. Time and again he altered course but still the storm held. He sailed into the swirl, spilled and only just broke the surface. He learned to work the oars, to steer, to tack.

The woman-child now suffers. The roar of the past permeates/envelops at every point. She is blind to the storm approaching and sails an erratic course, seeking a safe harbor but finding only choppy water and more rocky shores.  No anchor, no calm, no still.

From his safe moorings he watches her struggle to trim the sail but again and again the ropes foul. He longs to pilot as she is no hand at the tiller.

His cries to her to take to the oars, to save herself as he cannot. Too late. The child plunges unprepared into the maelstrom. He prays please right yourself, navigate the gale.  Too late.

I know a man. He has a daughter. She is lost.

I know a man. He lost a daughter.

He is lost.