When we walk at night, the wind sharp as
cool wood splinters, we see nothing but the ebb
of our shadows from the pacing streetlights when
all at once a great black beast of a shadow
whose approach we did not hear in our study
overcomes us as a steel wire of fear is plucked within,
buzzing until we are a cold shock of edge, and we
watch the bicyclist whisper past. Or else
we do not watch: we are yet clenched in the tightness
of everything lost even though it isn’t, clutching
what we possess into our hearts and digging
our chins into our chest bones. It was warmer
back there, back in the café even though we knew
it was cold outside, or back yesterday, or back
a season ago: yes, then we walked about without socks
and once in a while ran our hands through the grass.
How we would sleep there, never to rise again,
if a single blade would push its way through
the tundra that we knew, we really knew if you pressed
us, was coming. Now there is only ice and the promise
of ice, and the sick lights that carve mirages along
the sidewalks good only for predicting the horrors
we are too frightened to turn and see as only a
bicyclist. Here is where we live, on the cusp of exhale
and the moments we we will not remember in
the peace of continuity, without knowing it because
even if our past has taught us all we will ever need
to know, we will curl beneath the shadow and wait
for the consequence of every sin that is as real
as the end of time, except that when we walk at night
only the wind is sharp, only the lights move
since only we move.
