Sundial

for James Wright

   The poet will seek to clothe herself in sparrows.

A motor in each leaf
distills autumn’s engines and we’re off.

Upstart cartoon morning;
     these various roosters scratch inside the eyelids
     and declare beneath the streetlamps that their
     moats are filled with vowels.

That the life alone is not wasted but
rich with a pageantry of else.
Who absconds with our best sense
and seizes us by the throat as we untangle ourselves
from lovers and, draped in fever, split the
night into halves?                  Each contains a commercial
advertising just that.

                        Despite his tactics, fully rejecting experience
the candid creator winces at the audience’s heightened
passing.
       Remain, in secret,

a pea of concern, in some harbor of ghostly direction.
        There lurks an I among those hours.