You say you have your sights set
on a Wood Duck, incandescent in flight,

jigging like a lure through the thermals.
You escape before dawn, a jarred firefly,

promising you will return before I wake.
I roll to your down pillow, warm and gaunt

as a burlap sack of flour spilling into our bed.
Curling into hypnogogia, I knock about

in lucid dreams until I am plucked clean
from the plumage of half-bruised sleep.

Your watch clicks from a bureau drawer
of Battenberg, a train mewls through an hour,

the electric heat whirs still in the oak and
plaster walls, cracking alive and then settling.

Here in the house all goes noiseless
as wet gunpowder, and there you are cursing

your misfires, while I lie barren and
muffled, static in our serrated morning.

Earlier version previously published in Ad Hominem Art and Literature Review, 2010