Andrew Epstein
Late Light Allows Us To Begin
Tell about summer in winter.
Avocados on the heap. Beige
fingers clench and relax, leather-creased.
There are noons full as fruit stalls.
Pay phones guard the corners:
another chunk of hours with their own
light approaches like a menacing gang.
At least a sign people want
to reach each other.
Look around the bustle, to
where all things align
in their lack of congruence,
where a dried Christmas pine
leans against the parking meter
on every block or none,
as if the world is as ripe or bare
as you can imagine it to be –
where each brimming restaurant
gently dims its lights around
the same evening moment –
as the air between the buildings
darkens but the sky, off west the most,
stays bright. Each afternoon or
street unwinds its difficult thread.
Traffic lights spell a kind of order.
Amply couched, we both laughed
but couldn’t recall the joke’s origin
which spun away like a frustrating dime.
A line drops from the ceiling.
The stomach tells about the hour.
The time is out of joint, June in January.
What had been out of sight, like two figures
embracing so far off they look like dots –
just swung into full view.
You can see the quick scrawl of the fluttering
pigeon researching the weighty air.
You can see the fingers of trees groping
or just being what they are against the brick.
A scene that lies between this
building and the next,
a column of events and things,
leaves an impress on the sheets.
Thoughts jerked by the deepening hour,
like a line when a fish tugs.
What a world to forget each
passing day. Coffee, friends,
the dark kiss when I half woke up.
As if 5 PM must be a pivot
the whole flat expanse
of local time swivels around. Dark now.
So dark the sudden windows fill with
me, here, half-visible
typing, lamp across the room a puddle
of made light above my head, all half
present and – the world gone again –
half not: half washed to black.