1
The sun spins off into its last corner
down by the steel webbing that supports water towers,
down every stalk, into the stones with their layers of blackness,
giving breath to dust and blood to loneliness.

A kite string breaks,
the kite floats like a detached wing, single wing-tip
through the narrowing band of light, high
over Applebaum’s neon sign,,
away into the valley, over the curve of the small houses in the Czech
      neighborhood.

All falls down.
Light glitters along the frozen edges of the turnpike.
Chromatic dismembering,
totally alone in the changing scales of light
like a small boy standing in the dusk of his parents’ bedroom.
Downstairs the babysitter watches TV. The boy stands by his father’s
      bureau
and sees the familiar neighborhood go dark, sees the trees
on Reising’s hill, their branches like huge nests in the last light.

Children in the dusk.
The last line of carelessness,
jump ropes cutting a floating erratic arc in the purple sky.
Their voices rise,
human voice mist, a silver casualness
thrown back into the dark.

      2
What hides behind the dusk?
Light-sluice from another world,
down there at the end of the west-facing block,
only orange shards point the way, cairns on the journey
to the looming mountains, the blackness beyond tree line,
larger than an open mouth, as large as the turtle’s journey
as he drags through the wet sand to the river.

The fading light is inside you.
All the times you have been alone rise from the blood,
the orange wisps of solitude swirling around inside;
light lifts off the earth, finished;
everything finished.

A lone swing in the park.
Cold metal chains and a wooden seat.
The skin listens for its forests
as your feet scrape along the scooped-out dust under you.
You push up and out in the metal-squeaking dusk,
farther and farther out, parallel with the tops of trees,
You long for something friendly,
peer into the swinging disappearing earth
like a duck flying north
toward the long-absent marsh, the swerve back into earth waters.