What! Two In a Week? And From Last Night?

I seldom offer poems spontaneously, more often working on a revision of something written two years before. So why not be different now and then? Vicki hasn't been sleeping well recently and we often find ourselves up in what most consider the middle of the night This is an impression from last night, with only typographic changes. (Well. almost only!)

  Idea of February

Viewed from the sofa at four-thirty AM

on this mid-winter day the picture window

is as blank and black as the turned-off TV.

The outside world has gone away, what once

was a frozen pond, a ridge-top deckled

ragged with trees, just isn't there. Nothing is

except a few lights which may be the suns

of some other worlds. But every time I raise

my cup to take a sip the lamp beside us,

the cup itself, the window pane, conspire

and send me a message, just a flash that could

be from "out there", hopelessly sent

from some other beings desperate to know

if they are alone. I suppose I should be suddenly

encouraged, but knowing the inflexibility 

of time and the speed of light, they'll never know

so what does it matter how many other worlds

there may be?  We still feel alone here on this

old settee. We doze for a while and when we wake

the sky is suffused with a pre-dawn cream

which the ice on the pond glows in echo. Only

the ridge line still holds night''s black Those lights

which might have been stars resolve to street lights

dimmed by the trees. A fingernail paring

of the dying moon, hanging over where we know

the water tower will be, seems neighborly. 

We doze and we wait for the promised sun.