Night Call

Night Call

A car door slams my sleepless dream:

A few houses up, a crisis unfurling,

The door wide like a paralysed scream,

Light bleeding out; strange cars parked askew,

Their indicators throbbing like wounds.

The muffled urgent voices cut through

The uncomprehending terror night contrives;

Some blade, some shadow, some wrong turn,

Some thread of pain has knotted in their lives:

The sudden lurch of a midnight call,

The slow crescendoing of a long-expected silence,

The long illness, the last fall.

Lined outside, some neighbours watch, some friends,

Impassive as owls, shuffling coldly;

Cigarettes wink, red-eyed; blue smoke ascends

Into a not-even-shrugging sky.

They check their phones, offer small prayers.

Once, they think they heard a cry

That might have been a cat, or bird, or mother;

She moves beyond the window, on the phone:

God grant me, not this pain, but any other.

By three a.m. the crowds have gone. Lights

Still burn all through the house; and all through the house

A feral new darkness that is not night.

They know, they feel it, what comes after this:

Souls unmooring in shushed grey corridors

That morning whitens into an endlessness.