BLACK FRIDAY

Sitting here on the back deck ensconsced

in my down coat, I watch the wraiths of my breath,

vagrant souls fading under the sun. 

I’m drinking coffee and writing poems,

desperate and delicate poems about

the season, how the stiff leaves scuttle

across rime-frosted grass, how shadows

from the cedars stretch toward death.  I think of

my old loves, the bike races around Lost Lake,

the solitude of running lost in the woods,

seeing those lost photos from Joy of

that skinny punk squatting beside the greenhouse

writing poems, all of these surfacing on

Black Friday, alone and under the sun, wishing

all the time that I knew just one thing, something

I cannot see or know, something just

beyond the surface, like the shadowland,

where all the meaning lurks, like a truth

somehow knowable, but it turns out there’s nothing

there, nothing beyond the sun perched on the cedars,

the wind scuttling the leaves, and like the wind chimes

and a breath withheld, I can only hear

the neighbor’s hound yelping.  Even with this

coffee and crisp tingling in my fingers

I am slowly nodding off, drowsing

in the sun, dreaming -- if this is all

there is then this is failure and loneliness

at once, ecstasy slowly and exquisitely

fading from that very first captured breath —

that jolt into being! -- and now, sitting here,

years later, the chilling tendrils of breath

dissipating in the blueness, soon even this

will pass and I’ll think What was I thinking?,

What was I seeking?, beyond this, this,

and then, this.