Without Even Closing Your Eyes

At five a.m. if I lean just so the moon appears where the curtain doesn't quite meet the sash. All these odds and ends that somehow imply a whole. Poetry and notes and notes towards poetry. She doesn't indicate whether his apology was accepted, which oddly doesn't lessen his joy for having made it. Out back by the horses we suck coffee grounds from our teeth, chew them then spit, and our fathers and grandfathers nod approvingly in the perpetual dusk and dawn that framed the heavy anvil of work and now serves as the afterlife. Cigarettes, lifesavers, whiskey, bread. Dogs bark and you see black, all black, even without closing your eyes, and it makes you want to light a match, hold the flame to a lantern, and heft the lantern. Here boy. Everybody loves the man who mows the lawn without complaining or raising his rates. At five a.m. sometimes sheathes of frozen snow go sliding off the slate roof, a sort of rattling crescendo that ends with a crash in the driveway. Your frozen gravel, my reflected starlight. We all want to meet the builder but he's gone, no forwarding address, leaving us to a sense of place that's nice but never quite devolves into home.