Poetry, Long Night, Theresa Whitehill

LONG NIGHT

It's been a long night

and now that we're adding blue

back into the palette, now that we're

--oh--managing to understand

how it is with light, why it betrays us

each afternoon only to come blushing

back innocently with jasmine petal

softness, its tender hubs of automobiles

painted dusty rose. Now that

we've given up on stability, restlessness,

motion sickness, it fills our laps

with mulberries and international

air mail coupons and small chubby

fingers held aloft in artless greed

as if the moon were a rattle drifting down

into our hands and the stone horizon plenty

rapture.