And then I was trying to write a seven syllable
line in a poem called "The Night Watch."
These all such workshop poems, you've
written those too, of course.
Outdoors like a false morning, fog
washes the pine trees, it shoulders against the windows,
spreading across their surface on its way upward.
And this moment between sleep and fault,
this holding back, I can hear the fog start
to rise, the slow memory of an ocean.
And I, like a ship, begin to stare, to lurch in its swell,
and to move outward, beyond the steel jetty, the lighthouse,
the red flag channel buoys.
Beyond, at last, sleep even, into a deeper water,
pale, oracular, its waves motionless, seagulls absent.