by Christopher Raley
i.
I can only thank the old man
at the dark end of the room.
He speaks as these words come
and sometimes he speaks to me.
Right now he tells of a conversation
with a waitress, noting bare detail,
not impatient with the tempo of telling
because—and why would he be impatient
who has for the last hour walked with me
through endless repetition of a single pain
and indicted no one, not even the pain,
but only continued walking with me—
he must know, at some level, I’m sitting here
flinching away from what is biting me,
the pressure and the sting of my own wounding,
and he knows that I too must be shown
how to take the fangs again and again.
ii.
Let this be the darkness:
brilliant stars shrouded by the forest,
home light shuddered and kept,
the pines swaying, singing like dead saints.
The boy sought solitude for wisdom
and with it braced against the flights of friends.
But the man is punished by the void
and looks round corners for his vanished children.
iii.
On the road out of the mountains
from the house that sits beneath
its pale white light in darkness
to the house in the valley
where momentum and life’s junk
haggle on the sofa,
at the table, in the bedroom
for sovereignty over what spaces remain.
On the road in the twilight
on-coming headlights grapple
the many points of diffusion
pine sap made on the windshield.
I squint and I fear
for I speed to no great purpose
other than collapsing two points.
The forest does not love me
and the valley does not want me.
I hear the old man’s words
and I know he prophecies truly:
destination will diminish
and the going will become dull,
