The Sun Rising, Pacific Theatre
       

Here we have another moment of blue-sky thinking,
when no one loves you in the morning.
The tinderbox as empty as a train at 5 a.m.

It is 5 a.m.: a tin knife and fork packed in your pants,
you yank the sheets up where your neck
placed an envelope of nerves.

Acrid sky over us, streaked with the tar
blur of gasoline: the sky knows the machines
are being fed—that is blue-sky thinking,

when no one loves you less. I want to touch the raw
cloth of your coat sleeve while you put your body
inside it: it's like I'm the voice from the beginning

of an opera that speaks from the ceiling
gilded with octagonal tiles to say, there are exits
on all sides. But you are moving like a wheel

riding over a rope, and your lover
is your hand, lacing up boots through their rusted portals.
The sky reminds me of nothing, the way it feels

staring into white curls of light combed through stones.
What I thought was a tinderbox is actually
a box of bullets. What you thought was the sun is the sun.

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Copyright © 2019 Tyler Mills All rights reserved
from Hawk Parable
The University of Akron Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission