The Evening of the Mind

Now comes the evening of the mind.

Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;

Here is the shadow moving down the

Where you sit reading by the garden wall.

Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,

Shudder and droop.

Your know their voices now,

Faintly the martyred peaches crying

Your name, the name nobody knows but you.

It is the aura and the coming on.

It is the thing descending, circling, here.

And now it puts a claw out and you take it.

Thankfully in your lap you take it, so.

You said you would not go away again,

You did not want to go away — and yet,

It is as if you stood out on the

Watching a little boat drift

Beyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish…And you were in it, skimming past old snags,

Beyond, beyond, under a brazen

As soundless as a gong before it's struck —Suspended how? — and now they strike it,

The ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats,

And you must wake again to your own

And empty spaces in the throat.