Grace Street Nocturne
/Frederick Wilbur
Along the sidewalks of autumn avenues,
angels skateboard, delivering evening’s
first blush and daily summary.
Children on their way home
slush through pools of gingko leaves
that glow like the circles of lamplight
not yet flickered to compete.
Grackles, in fashionable negation,
are obnoxious arguments
not easily ignored, but how
can we imagine a paradise without birds?
Windows are audience eyes
that worry about the falling dark,
that worry about the mirrors they become,
turning themselves back into the warm room.
Passersby seem like tragic actors,
ghost-faced by smart phone screens.
Anxious warnings of sirens fade
into the illness of the city.
But you and I know this neighborhood
like a postcard we might send
to a cousin; each house
has an obituary fixed to the fridge
with a colorful magnet.
The moon rolls down the slot canyon
which is our street, dogs chasing it
into the long perspective.
Love that is terminal has time yet.
The curtains are pulley-ed shut
and languages are uncensored
so that we might feel the flesh of it.
Author’s Note: "Grace Street Nocturne" is mostly descriptive, but the intention is to raise questions about contemporary living: the glow of screens makes us tragic ghosts in our isolation, for instance. It is in the personal that we feel the flesh, the fullness, of language.
Frederick Wilbur is an architectural woodcarver and has written three books on the subject. His collections of poetry are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps. Among the many journals in which his work appears are: Appalachian Review, The Atlanta Review, The Aurorean, Cold Mountain Review, The Comstock Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Lyric, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, and online, Rise Up Review, Rotary Dial, and Verse-Virtual. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Award by Midwest Quarterly. He is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine (online).
