Before Dawn
Amber beads, the spiders bastion
their cottony egg. Six at first, seven,
then myriad others reveal themselves as stars do
the longer a watcher is willing to stare.
These are the first days of spring, days like
wind fierce, then mute as a snowy roof, a man
who touches a cigarette to the burner’s coiled blush
and leans back into the first drag
while Parker’s saxophone opens “Billie’s Bounce”
six consecutive times, giving the man the notion
each time the tune is cut and begun again that life
has stopped, rewound itself, and started again
without his noticing: the foil of how he feels
watching the constellations which seem so stationary
until he looks down, walks around the block,
and looking up again sees they’ve tracked miles of sky
in moments: sky that falls off the mountain now
like her robe to the floor — cut of tape,
plank of sky bridging star to star, iron
the stove’s blush slips back into —
onto which he steps, already spinning.