By Frederick Pollack

A weakness, a taste,
incipient
glaucoma — and you’re playing
a kind of “chicken”: seeing
how little you can see before you can’t.
Sunset alone moves; the
other windows offer
commentaries on sunset.
You enter the memory
of a room containing the idea
of a chair. The cat,
disturbed, turns, her eyes
reflecting streetlight
parsecs away. You
shuffle ritually among
buried causes, unintended
consequences, hidden angles,
wrapped in a certain rough,
enduring fabric.
Twilight is generous
at any social level: it swells
what you have, what you don’t.
Until at last you sit,
cornered beneath
one lamp, think
One lamp is sufficient,
and then reach up and turn it off.