Jason Chambers

Only three hours late
for the midnight eclipse,
but the moon sits fat
and full and smiling,
like she doesn’t know
what I’m talking about.
Like it never happened.
I just give her a little wink,
and twist up,
and sit my chair.
Likewise my own storm has passed
and left no trace.
Not a limb down, not a leaf.
But I was there.
You can’t fool me.
I wonder did I invite this darkness,
by error or omission.
If I did I don’t recall.
All this floundering in a current
I was born in,
my whole life a desperate reach for breath. For shore.
Nesting season is closed.
My birds flew all at once,
and vanished.
Now I’m weedeating gravestones sagging from the slow pull
of a quarter thousand years
and I’ve let the grass get
as long as I can so it lays
soft like a blanket when cut. There is nothing the dead love
so much as life.
Mornings crystalline, sentimental,
priapic beyond recourse.
Three times before the sun rose
I denied my own name.
As a caterpillar I did poorly.
I just been this butterfly
for maybe 10 minutes and already
my wings are beat all to hell.
They flutter, erratic, beautiful. Having been the one to break down,
over and again,
I am obliged to stop the roadside
for them in the ditch.
I keep the cast iron smooth,
or try to.

-Eclipse