An Insomnia Of Papa

by Suzann Kole

Long past gloaming,
a howl of crossbreeds
makes distant pleas with incalculable dark;
a chorus of bleating
shocks the low constancy of tree frogs..
and the thick breezeless silence.
Nothing responds without you.

I make tea; move mildly
through an open hillside
where the clouds fold and dissolve;
effortless, in waves of moon; lunar--
the chair, the stove, the comfort
we share in a tacit absence.
Your notes: a glow of foxfire
tucked about the bed,
irritates a rare secrecy.

I want the house--its hand-hewn logs
and high vaults of light--to sate
this appetite of early hope: nascent sky...
reaching for celestial grace--pervasive
as divine intervention...perverse
as the steps textured in abstract desire,
by the blond grass of old home.
Everyone lays prone
in this careful strategy of love.

I pick through the lapsed hedge;
combing a spotted impatiens and
a drought of phlox. Scents shift
though a confused air of late orange haze.
A wood-spider dashes my latticed thigh.
The house wicks a residue of dreams
into crevices of bedroom grievances.
Evening: an alchemy--
both edible and impossible.

The grip of this inconsolable devotion
of fine words
through a gauze of foreign dialect:
love is in fusion with touch and dawn

The dog. The small sounding of bells.
Cats trace the chaos of voles
in a circular stalking: misted silhouettes
on the still-opaque grounds of waking.

These volatile mementos of mood
course through bands of scar,
and protrude beneath
a transparency of revelation;
a topography of war:
these incisions and occlusions of mind...

The symmetry of my father's blue-roofed Pontiac,
and the white-washed office on the main drag near the bank,
is a freeze where he was laid after
Big Bands and late nights made
bad time with marriage and money.
His base clarinet and baritone croon
left imprints in the rafters of the cellar rooms
in the bungalow: a silence of years spread
in a spill of blood and a stigma of desire.

A fragile weft of ebony light surrounds the street
while we pass between us
a parallel history. He speaks low
and remembers the past
in soft, inescapable ligaments of sound.
Nothing is open. The cafe purges itself of trash.
Last call rattles the tired door.
We are caught in an urbane hub of high stories;
knotted in a mutual biology:
his potato soup and coal stove;
my dislocated dreams and small talk.