One

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in the morning--odd that this fulcrum rests
in the middle of darkness. Heliotrope, solar top,

the earth rolls us into the glare, out
of our duncecap shadow--by the numbers, not like

the cloud's slow wheel to rain, slurry,
river, ocean; nor even the men in their travels,

always returning. One sleeps behind the wall
and swims the white sheets that fold and twist

in the leftover light. Here on the dock, I have the water.
Or rather, what I have is its skin, that catches

red and green from the harbor lights,
and the waves that pass through it and leave it

whole, in their decorous physics,
and the hollow bass of the foghorn drilling me

clean of chatter. I think it must start
the octave of his sleep, pulling the neurons'

improvisations, the all-night REM fugue,
back to this tonic. That far, we are together, two,

and three, in the next house, and four,
five, in the bounty of counting.

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