Stark Evening

Cloudless at sundown, taking a sky clear from the gravity

of colors, a wryly cold agape in the comprehensive deepening

blue, broad extent of streets, sidewalks, motionless within

our leveled consolations that run peripheral to encountered hours

we previously prepared with prominence, only later with scant

acknowledgment not even held to ourselves, a pale transference

and left there lying in the open hand that let go to a wind

simply taking now a few more leaves with it to display possibilities

of absence, as full as the empty field that hosts the flights

of house sparrows while foraged over with wood smoke rising

from a gothic bramble elaborated in a fire that benedicts echo

within the stone, of intonate channel, ceremonious, while moon

still wanes to sliver, chimes hairline cracks in the astral signs

of bells, once embedded flowers, later scattered as mere curves

of the former petals beyond any capturing of time, reveling absolute

upon an infinite course, while beseeching our every wonderment.