James Sallis

Ordinary Nights

Sometimes at night the hand,
unable to sleep, remembers
all it has lost. Crescent moons
hang like nail parings
overhead. Wind strokes the house's sides
as though calming a pet.

Suddenly our hero is in Paris
strolling down boulevards
with a beautiful woman on its arm,
wine stains bold on its shirt,
bad verbs in its mouth.

Then that's all gone. Now the hand
dreams of water's ease, how it lay drifting
there, water's silence, water's calm.
And when it wakes it can't shake off
this image of itself huge as a billboard:
reaching, clutching.

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Volume XXI, Number 1