A Brighter Burn | Jenny Middleton
That night the light was slow
A faint glimmer before a brighter burn.
The singed green shade twisting
in the faint breeze mouthed
through half open windows.
I’d got up, too hot to sleep,
too tired really, for those ends
of things that tangle a mind’s
late thoughts
when a moth traced the vagueness
at the corners of the room.
Its confusion crashing at the walls,
the brightness its beacon,
and then its silhouette inside the stretched
satin shade seemed muffled
and drawn large as those paper puppets
in shadow theatres of old preconfiguring
its own demise and fizzed throes
of death as staged and restaged tragedies.
Then the stench of absence and heat
was all; a universe swallowed whole.
Shutting the light off, I stumble to the stairs
that fall into the dark, wheeling.
