Twilight
I must be confused if this is my body
I remember planting the nine rows of corn
Down on my knees in the mud after returning from
Vermont
Snow was still piled high inside the curves of my
skull
Here it is September & a blue plate is piled high with
steaming white corn in a mirror of oozy yellow
butter
I wonder if that’s only a picture of a machine gun the
sundial on the patio has aimed at my right eye
The candy striper told everyone in nine rooms how
she CPR revived a 98-year-old woman who had
fallen on the Big Bear parking lot
She regretted ripping the old woman’s wig &
breaking her dentures
If this is my body I must be somewhere else
What we are all afraid to say is probably the truth
Even though it sounds like the wind sharpening
a squadron of icicles
This is not a family newspaper so you can report
anything and use any kind of language
Even the silence hiding beneath the Atlantic
Ocean
I plan to decipher & translate it
It is not a rune & has almost no rhyme
The corn does taste delicious
The tomatoes – yellow & red – suggest this patio
should be renamed Mount Olympus
I don’t care if my language lacks the aorist
& the optative
You just think it is a big red razor blade up there
in the sky-scythe scraping some more sundial
shadow into the granite ocean
I always enjoy looking backwards – At Dawn
especially – Rosy Fingered Dawn
John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska – is now a retired comma herder / Phonics Coach after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines
Copyright © 2015 by John McKernan