The hushed slide of the back door
was the dream gone slack, my mother
not a ghost actor after all, but the horse was
a black vanish, silk slipping past the needle
and the day mumbled forward
inside all the interrupted clocks.
Later I watched the moon’s little path
of white fire across the lake—October
moon hanging in the throats of coyotes
beyond the boundary of night wire, a song
of blood and light.
The rattle I heard then was not death.
It was the day’s engine ticking, giving in,
an old wind wrangling the last leaves
from trees out there in the dark.
(Two Cities Review, 2016)