Flash

For Jaime A. Salazar

White morning, full of praise.

Before every thing wakes from sleep
I wake first, thinking some
Whatever thing.

Clumsily I pull back the blinds:
Blare of wondrous light!
Anticipatory sky!

It’s all there in cashmere,
Milky Way,
Eastman Kodak white,

Enveloping the brushes and stop signs.
This blanket covers them all. Even my
Interior lake is frosted in the blast of its

Whiteness. In the accumulation of life,
In things and places outside the window,
In our little igloo,

Chaos makes a metamorphosis into quietude.
No miraculous sounds: geese, car mufflers, couples walking:
None are heard.

And I stop breathing so that nothing
Sound while you’re asleep, so that
No thing dare break

The oceanic mystery of the antemeridian.

 

First published in Amerarcana: A Bird & Beckett Review, 2010, p. 68.