Digging
He cleans the coffee pot to prepare
for the next day’s routines. After the spoons
give back his image in the dish drainer
and the counter is dry, he sits in the dark house
listening to how night nests in the maples leaves
just outside the window, and moonlight
thickens its significance to something
he can’t even find synonyms for. He tries
by naming women he’s loved and children
he’s fathered, these cities on a map.
But to name certain things is an infidelity
even if it’s these the morning will wake him to,
like sunlight traveling inhuman distances
and meaning there is something here to be done.
Until then, there is this moment in a silence
underlined by his wife’s snore, the dark windows
stippled by industry lights stretched in the long
New Jersey landscape, out to the edge
of his habitat where there is a door
at which his thoughts paw and scratch.
***
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Photo by Vineet Radhakrishnan /Flickr