Like an oarless boat through midnight’s watery
ghosthouse, through lumens and shallows
of shadow, under smoky light that the full moon
reflects from snowfields to ceilings, I drift
on January’s tide from room to room, pausing
by the wooden clock with its pendulum that keeps
the beat like a heart certainly beating, to wait
for the pause allowing passage
to repose’s shore—where all waves halt
upreared and stony as the moon’s Mycenaean lions.