Poetry · Poem
Nightjar Over the Loxahatchee
A short poem for the hour that is not quite an hour.
The hour before the hour
is not an hour at all —
it is a bird, unnamed,
that leaves the cypress
before the cypress remembers
the shape of holding it.
Below, the black water
keeps its own accounting:
one alligator, one moon,
and the small, insistent
arithmetic of the frogs,
who have never learned
to round up.
I stand on the boardwalk
and, briefly, am counted.
Then the bird returns,
and I am not.