No one on the edge of night

A newcomer fidgets during sitting practice. I remind myself to give her some instruction: It’s essential to have a base on which to deconstruct.

Message from an editor who declines to publish one of my new poems, a piece full of darkness and descent. She liked my previous work, full of luminous, inventive word play, she says.
I understand her decision. The latest pieces are bare and immense with the simplicity of night, cutting down to the wire.
The previous pieces dazzle with the universe present everywhere, while the recent ones lead to no way out.
Of course there is not one without the other. And they are not, of course, two.

Last week, the young apple tree was in bloom. This evening the pink blossoms are gone. The cat rolls in the dirt under a canopy of ferns. Something of the coming darkness is at once ungraspable and all-consuming: Here I am, no one on the edge of night.