I visited you in the pill house, in the blue hour
like an empty bus stop and a field goal forever bending
right. You were an old flame, eyes like a double-barreled
shotgun, still— “they lock up the sharps,” you say
as if you want to cut an o from the moon and pop it on your lips.
Remember that party when we fell asleep on a pile of coats—
Wolf was alive then. And Kristin was still married
and that bartender at the Oak who looked like Samuel Beckett—
we were a constant quantity of Life Studies. And now a telephone
rings in the hall and the nightshift arrives, voices limp as mop water
fruit cups smirking on drowsy cafeteria trays. I don’t know what to do
with my hands to blot out the silence on the other end
and yet the birds overthrow the courtyard with song
and the first flush of tulip fever.
Damon Hubbs: gardener / casual birder / lapsed tennis player / author of the chapbooks ‘Coin Doors & Empires’ (Alien Buddha Press) and ‘The Day Sharks Walk on Land’ (Alien Buddha Press) / recent poems in Broken Antler, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, Crab Apple Literary, Red Ogre Review, Dreich, & elsewhere. Twitter @damon_hubbs