NIGHT WORDS

Photo/Collage by S. Auberle

NIGHT WORDS

Tell me of your terrible tenderness
and I'll tell you of mine.
How when one snowflake
spins down from the sky
I want to cry,
how I tremble at the first note
of a Rachmaninoff Concerto.
Tell me how you lie awake
watching the winter moon
spill light across your bed,
and I'll tell you how I clasp myself
when poems wander into my heart
in the deepest part of night,
how their urgency compels me
to write in the dark.
Tell me you, too, awaken
in the morning and read
scribbled words, wondering
who wrote them--all smudged
like that, and creased and crinkled
like the wrinkled sheets
we toss on all night long.

- mimi