Let It Be Night

BIix handed me five years.

Four I've chewed up,
tossed away.
       •
I'm pedaling my Raleigh, spokes
in the wind, mottled music
easing off toward evening.
Just gone yellow, a forsythia
stretches from mud where no one
planted it, leans left
as though it hears
a scrap of talk on the road.
       •
A baffle of green,
darkening,
November closing the store.
That's three months of my twelve.
Nine to go.
Maybe I get reborn once more.
       •
I'm watching for a hole
in the clouds and the sudden
scarred face of the moon.
       •
My love's slow breath rasped
across her lips in her last hour,
asking,
almost shaping a word.
       •
If I come new next summer,
let it be my
skinny self, watching by the tracks
as boxcars rumble their tonnage
west, shaking
the clay. Let it be night.
Under a streetlight, let three girls
be talking, sorting
shadows long in the grass.

--Conrad Hilberry