Howard Firkin
Red Rocks, February 2013
Beyond the season—past the sub-let sites,
the fold out couches and the weekly rents,
the front yards full of family friends in tents,
the music in the plover-startled nights—
the secret island dreams itself awake.
The waking is a tidal change of mood,
the reassertion of a silent will:
the heartbeat slows, the lungs expand and fill;
and everywhere discloses solitude,
the singleness it takes all things to make.

Tonight the sunset lights an orange sky
between two smokey charcoal limbs of land.
The gulls are black as crows as home they fly,
and I lie, losing warmth to night and sand.