Only night knows well the darkness
unknown in a shuttered room
the instant before sleep floods memory,
fragments that blink, unblink
off eyelid scrim glittering into infinity
Today a wheelchair boy strained to push himself
into the string of bodies winding in and out
the supermarket at the strip mall of confusion,
glanced down at the shimmer of my silhouette
quick stepping on the sidewalk beside me
I see again a castaway shoe on the grainy edge
of the highway I drove in early afternoon,
the face of the woman in the next car who turned
to look at treetops along the way twist in the whirl
of a would-be storm and caught me watching her
Tomorrow will never know what I see now
of what light shows in this final glimpse
of her eyes staring back, the troubled forehead
of the boy squinting with his cupped hand
held high to halt the advance of the sun
In this light after light is where I wait
the last flash, the last letting go