Sheet Lightning

For a moment in the small of night,
When the blood runs dead
And coming day cannot make light
Of patterns in the winter bed,

Lives taken, as they are, as given,
Current tides that lap the scene
In endless, schoolless rhythm,
Faded now as bones bleached green

In snapshots of a summer beach,
The colors long since stripped
Like sheets hung up for movie screens
Or paint from doors, or sun from lips

Whose sheen, like stars that glide
Above a sky still limp as sleep,
Is shot with sand, the picture-perfect slide
Of shadows playing in the deep

Sea just slightly left of center in
This photo of the universe, a kite
Slid neatly into place and liquid as the skin
Of children that we put aside

When an old man's harvest moon,
Angling off the swimming hole,
Throws reflections on the ceiling of the room
Like ocean dancing, or those children's souls

Made flesh and thrashing on the roof
Like ghouls, rippled badly as the sheets
Below, not an image but the proof
Of – what? Of age, of time, of street

Lighting from the womb, a whole
Litter lit by fission filtered from
A satellite to a pool to me, goal
Of angles, point of light, center of domestic sun,

To revel and make small of cosmic
Forces on a mortal wall,
Chain of circumstance and cause as thick
And fragile as the darkened fall,

So that this fusion of a mirrored world,
Of ribonucleic families,
With ample choice of strands to purl,
Comes here to knit for me,

To put the elements in moonlit order
With a bit of borrowed water:
A strangely reassuring feeling,
To find a reason on a ceiling.

October 30th & November 7th, 1985