8.22.17

Last night I awoke

in a stillness,

cold with the streetlamp

light streaking through

the windows,

circulating through the

ceiling fan. I could see

snow on the window panes

and hear snow falling outside

and the sound of car tires

churning, and I thought:

what if the dream was not

that from which I woke

but this into which I’ve entered?

I heard coyotes howling in the hills,

and I sat by the open window

and smoked a cigarette

and listened to them.

They too had suffered loss.

Though we are not the same

I understood the dreams of pain

contained within their mourning,

baffled, they too, at how we

fall and rise

into

out of

realities.

From beyond the hills came a figure

limping, a youngling, no larger than

raccoon, disoriented, injured,

bleeding his path onto the snow.

I watched him limp and whimper

for a while, making figure eights

in my driveway, until he circled around

three times and lay his body in the snow,

waiting, breathing, illuminated by a streetlamp

and nothing more, trapped here and forever separated,

waiting, like all of us, for an ending.

---

Written at 11:22 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA.