Are There Others?

The light
at day’s end. It shines through the rain moist leaves
and through my window.
It shines through the distance,
deep and cheshire,
the winter has seized and is creeping in.
Fall shallowing,
the Earth turning–

And there.

Another turning Earth…

Is there something important about this,
the turning, the whiling about?
What worth is there to scribble notes — you did not give them to anyone.
How many would laugh: “Oh, a poem!”
They must be very terrified of feeling foolish,
but to fear foolishness so much is to commit yourself to it.
How half-heartedly they live with their accident.
Though one may not fear it in the same way, you may still be hurt by it.

And the mad scribblings still fall at the feet of poets greater than myself,
and so many lines get offloaded into an aptly titled book of things never said. And then
what worth has any of it?
Always scribbling, furiously, dejectedly, madly, wildly hopeful
in a moment and dashed by greater friends who have never known me but
I them. Perhaps
in another world time will work differently.

As a ship in the night, the cargo is brimming and lo! the winter shore —
I reach out passed the snowcapped dunescape where there is another fall.
And
then there is another.
Coyote howls and cries in the night.
It is grief-stricken and its silvery mane winnows the frigid deep.
The earth turns, and it seems the sun will come up again. And,
as was always, it is made of bread and wine.
They have tricked me into this love.
Who could blame them for they too were once furious, mad, wild-eyed
scribblers
meandering through distant night, struck by a
searching light. I am sure
they too hid from it, for a time…

Nonetheless, it seems, we still need poets, or,
at least, I do.

Otherwise,
everything would be just a joke.

Wouldn’t it?