Night
rummages around
my room

Emerges
out of hiding
from a snuffed flame

Drapes
the windows
overhead jets vibrate

Shinnies up
the sides of shadows
its emptiness occupies

Faces itself
in the photograph
of a mirror's darkness

Tricks
my bedroom night-lite
to let it in

Let it sleep 
inside
my breathing

Turning back
to its ancestoral pulp

having withstood
wind fire ice
and the lumberjack's
yellow tag

the page
has no memory
its lost leaves
can provide

it occupies
no space to call hime
inside itself

has lost its way
from xylum and phloem
roots and tendrils
flowers and fruits

and settled here
beneath my pen
to suffer the words

that will never mean
as much to it
as the tree
it believes it still is

THE AWFUL PRESENCE OF MY DOG'S ABSENCE
          —for Bodhi

So limited in thinking I have range catches up to me, gravitates helpless seeds through weighted nets of nerve endings plunged into my bloodstream; seeds that clouds, shadowing and brightening the land, plant and move on before becoming unsolveable quotients divisible only by human exhaustion, cow manure, or by bundling up an entire universe in a blue and white checkered sky's knotted tablecloth and slung over my right shoulder on a pole where I'm more than out walking my dog's shadowless ghost along the stone road that leads to the most brilliant place of bones once known to us all as the Milky Way.

We never knew
time could make so much noise

could click one second after another
ahead to the next

advance the repetitivee circular motion
of its minute hand into each unknown moment

climax with each chime or reminder
at any given hour

awake us by tugging at the moral leash
of our irresponsible dreams

Paul B. Roth, Fayetteville, New York