July 13, 2010

poem at 3 a.m.

This isn't the time for words. My head, damp from the night's
humidity, finds itself inert against the pillow. A fan is on,
busying itself with air. I’m swimming in a memory, or two bites
of it, a meal last August on a Tuscan farmstead, a pizza oven
billowing out plumes of basil and sweet onion. Ellipses of rain murmur
into the roof. Somewhere in the garden, a rabbit is pilfering the last
of the strawberries. Earlier, I saw lightning bugs batting summer
through their wings, and the evening was polka-dotted with light. I asked
myself, What’s there left to write? What art to make from all this stuff?
But even silence is replete with eloquence. Sometimes listening is enough.