Cedar Hill Nocturne

poem #33

Photo by the author

Follow the scent of burning salt and buzzing
hum of dying moth in summer night
down Church Street into manic show
of cedar limbs in sodium light -

rehearse the tune that they will dance,
the one that resurrects 
the stories from the days before 
we threw our children out beneath them,

before the madman made his crown 
of streetlamp eggwash umber 
and the blackened bones of beggars' hands 
were heard to grind inside its darkness,

under umbra in the grinning lowness 
of the back lots where the light is jaundiced,
wringing out their motive tension,
aching for the warmth

of drywall censed in ash and smoke 
and yellow scenes that crawl like 
fleshy grime from window
unto window -

in the weakest hour
of nightlife's gut-sick slowness,
feeding all our gathered ends
into the alley's hungry stillness.