Mount Pleasant
All night, six vagrants stood at our stoop
chewing the fat out of a too stout story.
She did this, did that, took that, she never,
never, never, never, never, . . . A white fluttering, a
thought, like headlights from a passing car,
lights up this room
where I’ve never been restful,
never still. Outside, the buses must be un-routing.
I hear their slow-going screech round the corner,
engines dying. My neighbor’s a dinosaur, Bonnie,
she’s lived here since the commune days,
eats hemp seeds, I bet, always nods at me. It’s not her
out there, but she’s in my head, the lonely field
I imagine each night, awake again
nowhere else to go.
Never is
a strange design, to name what can’t be
or won’t begin.…
