Excerpt from Unrest

Return Trip by Night

We coasted in idle down from the pass toward the white salt flats
that blazed up into a mind made entirely of light.

The wings of monarchs flared from the ditches in a storm of ill orange
that burned into the grillwork like jack tobacco curing to rot under the moon.

Low-slung rain reddened at dawn and made of the whole air a wild vow.

Hush. It was exactly then--

then that the puncture wounds we’d put for so long into wherever of ourselves was left
started to green at the edges, turn into history and heal.

The shaking eases up by late autumn, and then the pallor, as the blue asters open.

They are almost a sky.

There is a full night of sleep.

Every so often the bored neighbors wing bottles into the alley.
The shattering against rock blows a shock of needles into the breeze.

Its noise is a fury--in the dark something fast, fleeing.

From Unrest. © 2009 by Joanna Rawson. All rights reserved.