A dry pillow, my throat, and the ticking of the clock are dry. My eyes open and close, thinking of darkness and differences that frighten. * With or without the radio on? I ask myself, cold Driving at night alone on an empty road. It makes a difference, I thought, even though it’s So what in this shit of all yellow darkness, flooding the way the night fills gullies. Be careful, Watch where you’re going, now knowing what might fall. I drove in silence open. I’d been afraid to call her. I love you, I’d have said, like I wouldn’t dare to honk the horn only to be absorbed dull in the night’s expectation. * Awake, her warm room her nose, cold, wet eyes before the window, the pane, slick and clear, fogging thinly before her open mouth, looking out in the dark. Frosting on the grass, the starlight, quiet. * A light extinguishes before a bed alone, and I sigh. For a dead darkness reeks of metal problems that meet and recede, opaque, of I don’t know of what it is, of the thought is continued in a wait like a closed door. A sadness that breeds silence, or A hope whose care floods, and can’t be answered.
April 1972