Night of Moment
Gay Brewer
This, the self-definitive night you've waited for,
the night you've dreaded with a sweet anxiety.
Imagine it so. Imagine that she comes
to you with her eyes like ocean diamonds,
the one who understands your incomplete perfection.
That sense of otherness beyond the explicable,
the swirling soothe of now, your quiet hand
riding on a thigh as smooth and white
as the last road to heaven. As the story proceeds
a gun is involved, an understated pledge,
that something arriving in you for a long time.
There's a hotel room, the sun through winter trees,
a pleasant dizziness of certain surrender.
You allow your mind to unfocus, to glimpse
a wisp of hair, blood stains on shoes, pants, shirt.
This is the night you've dreaded and revered.
What will you do now, in this romantic interruption
of that fake other life? Money on the bed,
the cool cold inevitability, her curling laughter
which seems so simply distant you cannot answer.
