A Night Story

by Laura Dunn

My words bake in flecks of wood, as night
folds me in planks of windowsill. Below
the yellow lights of cars stream by, and I
begin to write a story on plates of glass.

* * * *

I slowly trace the face of my grandfather,
young, his hands unlined, he holds a boat's rail
in a season after war.
As yellow lights sew a city into the night
his three comrades sing
away their continent. Tonight I'll make
him a poet, a planet, a clear space
where stories roam like madmen prowl the night
and every closed shopfront pleads to them "wail."
I listen, footsteps pat beneath and shots
echo among Penang's green vines, the clatter
creases the lines of glass. Move with me now,
dual time, back to ship, the seventeen
year old, in green eyes, in grayest fog, craves
a swim. He strips of fatigues and naked,
he jumps into cool water. His splash breaks
the line of soldier's song. He starts to breathe,
to swim toward yellow lights and Singapore.
No longer just a light or sound, beneath
him is the word, nation, a mass of white
particles sticking to his wet skin.

* * * * *

Then lights shut off across the heavy street
and night, it smoothes all wrinkles from pavement
to window glass. The vision lodges
in dents of wood, in drying ink, in rush
of night on his limbs. From air
to water, land to land, my grandfather
quietly plunged his body toward the wood
of vestige. But war found him, and morning
found me, asleep on the windowsill. Day
light maps the outline of my grandfather,
lines of poetry creasing his clear skin.