Kate Northrop Poem: Decorations

            

Decorations

                                    (tired and high-pitched)

Ghosts have been tied into the trees.

At dawn they pivot

In the wind slowly.

Where the moon windows in

I am of those

Who can’t stand it

Kept awake, humming with trucks

While anything lunar

Won’t rut, ruminates.  Overhead, uh-hunh—

Days, the neighbor’s girl plays a game: what is?

What is dusk, she says, as the sky

ends it begins.

I play myself. What is death?  What’s poetry?  What

Is time?  Time needs no hanky, time blows by

the Kleenex flowers.  Or time’s

so slow, starry-cold, even is cold

            and sure, little admonishments.

                        .

Were you awake all night?

I was.  I was awake all night.

                                                          -Kate Norhtrop

                                                           first published in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact.