All-Night Newsfeed.

Neumire, William

    Here I take the box of world
   to watch its fevers grow,
   its governance by owls,
   those eyes that glow all night
   like Laundromats. I see
   the way it carries me, its hooks,
   the eulogy of snow. By common law
   I'm stuck steep above my own life,
   or below, the way these prepositions
   don't mean anything if you're far
   enough away. The owls
   skirt rags of light from town:
   insomniacs, sirens, a stove's
   orange warning.
   There's a bonfire in the snow
   & girls & drinks & the light
   that is itself a prayer
   if prayer is an answer more
   than a question for the sable-silvered clouds.
   On the golden record
   "Dark is the Night" by Willie Johnson
   catechizes space in waves
   as American madness raves
   in echoic elementary schools.
   Don't go, don't go,
 I hear them pray
   while November dangles like an ornament.
   Dust rises off of us like crowns
   of fathers that say our sons will kill us all,
     they stopped talking long ago.
   I am claimed by distant touch,
   by the rumor of firn from the first
   snow still telling the old stories
   of the world:
   it's not a snowglobe, it's not
   to be shaken. Someone's racket
   of life is in there. That someone
   is me, you owl, you king
   of end credits & coal-mouthed glow.