Last Poem
On a Thursday afternoon with the roads and the gardens full of nearly rain the final word gives in and takes its place such an ill-sorted word for that moment a morning-flower word an eye bright already in the minute before dawn a word to start a holiday to blow about a bride’s step-frothing train a yes in its own circle-song but there nonetheless in a poem that clangs the door that is the back view of a trilby’d man with a suitcase on a smoke-baffled platform as the porter draws the gate on the late express that is the arranging handshake of old friends who part for home one to stamp feet on the porch-mat the other to die in the dark a word running this way in a poem running that and the pages lie as left the pen sleeps capless on a road and garden Thursday with rain just begun
Michael W. Thomas, from Come to Pass (Oversteps, 2014)
