Poetry

Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality . . .

—Wallace Stevens

An absence in reality, a beingaway from reality. To absent oneself,to abstain, to yield to the moonthat appears like a wraith at the door.

Abscissa to the world’s ordinate:the night rears like a stallion.By day, an apostatic sun quitsthe contention of its sequent toil.

Not a paraphrase, but an abscissionof the soul, the warp and weftof its abstruser musings, the riftin the yarn that unravels the whole,

the horizon where every abstractsinks, the fluttering pennant of a shipdestined for an unknown port. A prayerfor absolution, if not the absolute.