The light has gone out and the dogs lie sleeping.
The birds have finished their winter songs.
This is the time, with night come now
fully down, when I ought to draft
a calm vintage anthem of silence—
flakes of starlight wheeling too slowly
to notice beyond the clouds;
flowers still left to the year
cupping frost in their throats;
granite stones grown stubborn
in the mowed field up on the hill.
But even in this hour
a piece of glassed-in sea hums beside my chair.
Above the zebra eel a trigger fish hovering
takes blue stock of his chances.
In the red coral cave, that stowaway crab
decorates his carapace with shells.