home in the shadows

Near sunset a dog lopes home

looking back over its shoulder

toward the dying sky,

the light of a new night

igniting before its own shadow

like a clock winding itself.



It is sometimes not the thing itself

but its inversion that brings us nearest home,

not the family gathered on the lawn

but its canted shadow --

the arm outstretched, the hand clasped

desperately to a shoulder, inseparable

and false as the night that falls

like bat song from the trilling sky.



So whatever else descends from that same sky

inevitably also draws unto itself

the sour knowledge that in this night,

in this home,

the crying shoulder,

has lost itself to the mercury

of light and shadow.



Retrieve them, the book from the shadow,

thrown by the sideboard edged with sky.

Let the light falling over your shoulder

collect and pool until time itself

is utterly at home

and careless in the familiar, dog-eared night.



Invite it in, the ravelling night.

Steep in its shadow,

render far from home

the billeted sky

into something not itself,

and ignore the cold seeping into

your neck and shoulder.



Home, though it may help to know,

is not only there in that book,

in the coming night;

its is also here, in the arc if this

new shoulder falling at last into shadow

rounded and worn into perfection

like the sky itself.