City Night
by Michael Miller
Somehow, another made it home tonight.
Somehow the connection wasn’t missed,
out in the dark street where engines hissed
and moaned, packed together close
in the frozen lamplight,
where doors draw back and payphones are forbidden,
and men pray to women in bright lit windows.
One hand beckons and another stays hidden
with its cut-off threads of those that disappeared,
but though I walk at night, I feel no fear.
This train lamp, and the buzzing Chinese sign
in the distance,
are the same lights that threw colors at her feet,
and led her down the path of greatest resistance
with a simple guiding line.
On the road, she was met by faces,
smiling blankly or clouded in the back seat
by late-night magazines and cigarette smoke,
which lingered on the pillow where she next awoke.
Deliverance, in the city night, comes in strange places.
For every soul tonight that fell from grace,
with the shadows that extend
like still black lakes behind a torn wire fence,
I have no knife or talisman to make amends.
Only the fear of being erased
exists at the moment beyond time and sense,
where blood in the veins becomes a suicide rush
for the ecstasy of one more breath.
The blinding cycle of life and death
haunted me for miles,
racing headlong through the brush
until my knees collapsed from wear.
I held my wrist out to be slashed,
and found it only stroked
by the chill of the midnight air.
The train that rolls into this station
after dark gathers only the faces that remain,
but her footsteps, and the final words she spoke,
have taken leave for now from desecration.
She’ll be at rest for eight hours, or more.
Deliverance, in the city night, is just a door
with one strong chain.
*First published in Thief After Dark (FarStarFire Press, 2002)
Michael Miller is the co-founder of Moon Tide Press, the author of five books of poetry, and a former entertainment and community news journalist for the Los Angeles Times. He currently teaches English and coordinates the visiting-author program at St. Cyril of Jerusalem School in Encino, California. You may read more about him and visit his blog at www.michaelmillerpoet.com.
