Nightfall
RON STOTTLEMYER
So dark now, this time,
weighing us down—peonies drooping
along the shaded sidewalk.
Over there in the city park,
a couple is swinging under the streetlight,
breath floating out, then plunging down,
ground springing back up again.
Farther north, thunder breaks free
as the blue ice cracks open the horizon.
In the slow sundown, no one hears
anything. The swing is still.
The couple walks off into the night.
Unseen, each galaxy spins emptiness
around its tilted clock face. Unimaginable,
the speeds, the light swept away.
Ron Stottlemyer lives in Helena, Mt. After a career of teaching/scholarship in college and universities across the country, he is returning to his life-long love of writing poetry. Along with writing, he has a passion for amateur astronomy, Mid-Eastern cooking, and for living with the moment. He believes that real poetry has its sole origin in corner-of-the-eye surprise, lives only in metaphor, and has graceful syntax, the stone of its memory. After starting to send poems this past spring, he has recently published in the Alabama Literary Review, The Sow’s Ear, Streetlight, and The American Journal of Poetry.