Per Annum

(Or, It Takes a Year)

Every room in this house is a world,
every window a universe filled with
hot gas and expanding over the horizon
like dawn, or rising over this far lip
of the world as galloping herds of
wild horses would when cresting
the top of a rise and thundering
down to the valley, and their movement
made silent by distance but no less
wondrous, for all things are possible,
the times are new, all is restored to
life from these slow deaths we’ve
suffered as time went slow and
darkness lingered.

Every room in this house is a world,
every window a universe now active
with midday, burning bright as tigers,
bright as yellow wheat grass waving
languid when it’s too hot for anything
else, and the entire point of being is
to sit in the shade of the front porch
and look out onto work not done
this day, tart lemonade in hand
not cognizant of time, not concerned
for futures promised only in abstract,
but concerned only with what comfort
can be bought at that theorized future’s
expense.

Every room in this house is a world,
every window a universe now fallen
quiet as evening coyotes trotting on
the periphery of a fire, cornstalks
crackling in a pile of smoky ash
beside the stubbled field, the consideration
of pumpkins and fall canning now
insinuated upon our consciousness
as nights grow colder and mornings
are greeted with a rime of frost atop
the fallen soldiers of the season, those
shed coats of dormant trees.

Every room in this house is a world,
every window a universe of whistling
wind and cold gray sparks upon
the ether, the gloom and chill of
another eon under wraps, fish frozen
under ice, toads like chips of mud
beneath the peat, bears slipping time
in their way across the chasm between
here and the eternal hope of there,
waiting to explode again in the violence
of color, the joyous brutality of life
and light and the promise of day
coming bright upon the dirty
coat tails of a tyrannical nocturne.