Set Up For The Night, The Candle In Its Niche

Set up for the night, the candle in its niche,
Jupiter a long way from the moon by now,
cat and goldfish fed, my mind never is
but my heart seems to be in the right place,
smokes, coffee, heat, a loaf of whole wheat bread,
not quite Omar Khayyam, a jug of wine, and Thou,
but the bough is on the fire and I’ve got the Pleiades
to make me feel like a sexy astronomer
if the life mask I’m wearing isn’t convincing enough.

The moon’s off aloofly waning below the horizon.
There’s a commotion of ghosts below my apartment window
and the furnace is cracking its knuckles as if
it were getting ready for a fight. And I want to write
from the least expected quarter when you least expect it
in a space where my heart isn’t just another synonym for solitude.

Explore my mind in its omniabsence by handing out
free telescopes to the fireflies and asking them if they can see
two stars over at eleven o clock from the dim one,
the same thing I’m looking at. I want to
investigate the morphology of knowledge forms
among the mad, wholly absorbed, nothing left out, by my work.
That’s what I call it for the want of a better word
but most of the time it’s a kind of dangerous fun
that keeps me warily engaged on full alert
listening to a voice singing in a lighthouse
on the coast of the moon that laughs
nervously like a lifeboat at the weather.

Or Shelley in the Gulf of Leghorn. If I didn’t say anything
how could the silence know how beautiful it is
to experience the world as an aimless, drifting intelligence
at ease with itself as it toys lightly with elegant distinctions
that burn like paper boats origamied out of Zen poems
that come and go as they please like the moon in the window?

True excellence doesn’t rule like an aristocracy.
There are too many wonders in the world to be distracted by.
And there’s an hour. It doesn’t come often. But it never
fails to return. One disquietingly beautiful daughter of time,
lying down in the cool summer grass looking up at the stars
as if her whole body were vivid with light
as she savoured the ages that went into every single flash
of the beauty of her brevity. Firefly eyes in a lightning storm.

You can lie down nameless with her like a secret syllable
and speak in a voice older than words about things
you both know there are no answers to, and why
the shared sadness grows more beautiful the less it clings
to the lucid delusions we precariously cherish the most.
You can rendezvous with her at zenith on the hyperbolic arc
of a burning bridge or a comet that’s only going to come once
and your detachment’s a deeper intimacy
than anything you’re ever going to experience
with anyone in life ever again however hard you try
to rinse the ashes of the falling stars out of your hair for good.

On a cold night like this, even an eclipse gets creative
and she’s the crow silhouetted by a moon blossom
rising in the west of a dead branch still lamenting
the loss of its songbird as she leans down
low on the green bough of the east and suggests
maybe it’s time to get over your grief by learning
to sing for yourself. It might feel like confusion at first.
But at heart it’s an infusion of growth and compassion.

All relationships with a muse are illicit. Like blue moons
it’s not good to conduct business under. So you don’t.
And mundanity’s at a premium only a mystic could ill-afford.
It’s like taking the future for a test-drive before
the vehicle’s on the market. And at daybreak,
whether you look upon it as an entrance or an exit,
by example, living it, it’s much like mentoring a star
that always woke up too late to greet its own light
how to say farewell in the dawn and really mean it.