The town has settled in for the night,
its corners rounded, the past put to bed,
the present a dual state of being and non-being,
the future a matter of differing opinions.
All good souls are sleeping, but the one,
the little boy with the cosmos in his head,
somehow attuned to the global thrum,
to the billion-year-old darkness, a field of eminence
in the fugues of creation and invention.
He traces constellations on a glass,
a new zodiac of mystic lambs and sacred centipedes.
He studies the tarry charts for witches’ spells.
Sleepy now, he petitions the unknowable,
nodding like a puppy, his senses closing in.
A fissure opens in the physical realm.
The boy flies then falls
into the world inside this world.
Night reddens with the stars’ infections.
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have also been broadcast and performed globally.
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