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One day
I will drift
into darkness
and know it
perhaps
the way a son
recognizes a mother
after he has returned
from many years
of travel
understanding
the new distance
is neither
beginning nor
end
only stillness
Copyright © 2015 by Dean Rader. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 30, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
Light the last light and lift—
and lift again in to that obscurity—
blue-skinned sky & what it cannot lead to—
the always immolated flesh of this world’s bone-shell—
what lasts? what goes like a trumpet blast
The news this morning
said that Ramadi
had fallen to ISIS
and that the president
did not have a plan
to push them back
into the Anbar province
though I have a plan
to walk down to the
beach in silence perhaps
where I will stand
in water the temperature
of most corpses
and look out over
the shapeless ocean—
its waves shifting from
one color to the next,
this moment the shade
of an old bruise—
toward Japan,
which I imagine I see
across the map of
motion, that mystical