By then we concede a kind of completion,
draw chain link closed for evening, rub
sober the cool stomachs of our lampshades.
I can see the clouds the animals make,
the moonlit clouds inside me,
and the moon itself,
why we are glowing if not outwardly.
My cabinets open against a pipe freeze.
Saint Peter, our hometown is freezing pigeons this December
when our region hasn’t had not one snow,
not one third of an inch all season.
Encroach, trapeze cold. Peter,
it is our only cold. How our collective old
man looks in the shadowy porchlight,
how cigarette smoke is our first clouds,
crawling wise across the gravel. Peter,
I once woke with the sensation I’d swallowed a spider.
I once woke with a palmetto bug inside my mouth.
I’d rather night inside my mouth, hayseed,
or the host than morning at five a.m. when I shudder,
when I wake up on the river’s dock, say
Prime psalms, dive in for the workday.
Tonight my childhood home remains nonnative, remains
iglooed from the decisions that surround me.
When my father tells the story of patrolling downstairs—
discalced with his midnight sawed-off,
when my mother said she was certain she heard a prowler in the garden—
the punchline changes from coyote, to polecat, to wind.
C. Henry Smith is a poet from West Texas. He is the author of the chapbooks Warren (Ghost City) and Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire (Finishing Line). @chenrysmith
Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash
