Nocturne by Tea
You sit alone on the deck, under the night stars
that stir no romantic wonder, just dim night lights
that fade with day as everything does. They may
as well be lamps studded to the firmament as the
ancients believed, or icy little guideposts pointing
backwards to where you were, forward to where
you must go. The time could be winter, uncertain,
for certainty vanished with youth, the unknowing
expansion of the universe. Animals make noises
out in the dark, they as definite as melting glaciers,
where both will dissolve with morning, the way
a marriage thaws when the plug is pulled from the
refrigerator. You observe all this, not as some chewed
oracle in the grave, but through the conviction of hot
green tea that remains warm as you are warm, each
sip a liquid memory stored by taste buds. Curiously,
you listen to sounds never heard that merge together
as clouds—low throat rumble of a train, car horns,
distant laughter, an owl’s nocturnal song, the coyote’s
cry—fused only in illusion, till torn apart by the mind
seeking patterns the way seismic waves are felt but
not seen, the way a teenager pines for love. This
should be a celebration not a censure. You self-reprimand
as though you were a child talking to self,
and indeed wonder if the stars are glued to the sky.
Ralph Monday is an Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing courses. He has been published widely in over 50 journals including The New Plains Review, New Liberties Review, Fiction Week Literary Review and many others. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Houghton Mifflin’s “Best of” Anthologies, as well as other awards. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014.