November

for Klyd Watkins

A nighttime hour came when I drove out and found a haven in the late year weather.
The rest of the world boozed and fought and laughed but mostly slept, and the year kept its schedule dreaming, and I stopped on a quiet hill
and watched the still town under the low and moving sky,
and watched the leaves flurry from one place to another and rest and go again, and it was you, November, turning in your sleep, and it was your threat of fury and your promise of calm.
The clouds came lower, making a thing comfortable and stirring,
a vast room without walls, dressing midnight in its tender gibbous, and extending from the summit of this rise
a vision of a still and dark and sufficient world.
I saw the trees shivering in the wind;
I saw the dark, locked houses.
On this night dreams were reaching into the air—wants and satisfactions humming in the wires, ghosting out from vents and chimneys.
I restarted the car and drifted down, a silent stranger, through gales of yellow leaves.
Tomorrow the noisy streets will be filled with strangers who mostly live somewhere between the word and the act, and rarely venture awake, as I rarely do,
to places where time lingers briefly in its corridor. A moment I meant to remember will pass,
but it’s all right.
Every moment is a desire for a sufficient world, a prayer for the sufficiency of every world
every silent stranger leaves in his wake.