Late Hour

We have found a new routine:
slightly earlier to bed, slightly less late talking
as we sink in this low-lying futon to dream.

The day slips off as easily as our clothes;
the heating makes a dull milk-shed moan
and something outside our hilltop flat grows and grows.

Is it night? A star’s tincture? The sense
of what we will not know? Our world
shrinks to the width of the bedroom’s lens.

Night thickens and the white wall,
a desert sphinx, a blank Buddha,
says nothing, a nothing, that is all.


October

a new quarantine,
days that hold before the clocks change,
the summer air chills to a setting coolness
...