Talent Poem

Meditations

1

The good fall to sleep
to never awake.
Every town has
its criminals,
lunatics and pacifists.
Its bad actors,
failed musicians.
Hustlers and widowed,
its pious drunkards; its
housekeepers humming
melodies they can’t keep,
suicides and fathers,
broken veterans,
its poets and mean people,
its generations.

2

Dooley was sleepless.
Smoke from a cigar
found its way past his door,
the scent drifting toward him,
lingering until it diminished
with the footsteps in the hallway,
sound and scent
falling away,
falling into
another
lost day.

3

Meanwhile,
across Emigrant Lake,
among the spiny pines,
in the noiseless distance,
the blackbirds found a place to
be themselves,
to be quiet for a time,
to sleep with their own.

Until, in one of Talent’s
secret groves,
they heard voices,
the violent clicking
of stones and metal,
shoveling.

By moonlight,
the soft dirt falling away
like black snow.

4

The good fall to sleep
to never awake.
Every town has
its mechanics and bartenders,
floozies and coffee drinkers,
guitar pickers, singers,
philologists and trumpeters.
Its old dogs,
the lonely;
always the lonely,
sleepless,
awaiting a new day.


TS