Poem 117

Imagining us as nomads moving around the different topographies of the 24-hour day – highlands of sleep, flat lowlands of morning … 1989 was obviously not the last year of anything but I’m having ennui for breakfast, feeling we’ve reached the end of history …

… you can tell I’m not a morning person …  

( this is so visual to me … dust stubbling a sunbeam, coffee sunlight making everything look sepia, carts coming down to the river – and thinnesses, what a word that is … )

Miramar Morning

Light sweeps us off the page of sleep
and we fall amongst the letters
making no sense of our dreams
     the tired day stands shaking
       vitamin deficient
at our doorway
                 dust stubbling a sunbeam

we rise boil water
attend to cats
               the dead are everywhere
coffee sunlight making old photographs
of us in our house in the last year
                                      1989
high behind
              the hills of sleep pulled impossibly up
through thinnesses of night
        we come now
onto the river plain
with our carts and our wagons
to wash in the slow-moving
water