Chill

[rejectomorph]

A day runs down again and there's night, and there's Orion on his way to places where he has some other name. I've forgotten the sun already and let myself be absorbed by the dark sky and its stars. The waning moon has not yet risen above the pines. The scent of the recent rain lingers in damp earth and moldering leaves and fresh grass. The Sunday traffic has all but vanished, everyone gone into houses where dim light makes curtains glow. I stay outside for a while, listening for frogs, but none are croaking tonight. The birds have long since gone to their nests, some in bushes from which, now and then, I hear a brief flutter of wings and rustling of leaves. The sound of a single passing car slowly vanishes down the long road, and then Orion and I are left in silence.




Sunday Verse

First Things At the Last Minute

by Robert Hass


The white water rush of some warbler's song.
Last night, a few strewings of ransacked moonlight
On the sheets. You don't know what slumped forward
In the nineteen-forties taxi or why they blamed you
Or what the altered landscape, willowy, riparian,
Had to do with the reasons why everyone
Should be giving things away, quickly,
Except for spendthrift sorrow that can't bear
The need to be forgiven and keeps looking for something
To forgive. The motion of washing machines
Is called agitation. Object constancy is a term
Devised to indicate what a child requires
From days. Clean sheets are an example
Of something that, under many circumstances,
A person can control. The patterns moonlight makes
Are chancier, and dreams, well, dreams
Will have their way with you, their way
With you, will have their way.