The leaves have turned
Often since I left the garden  

His absence held me
Too long to that land  

I remained a bottomless well
A foot stuck in concrete  

Until the delicious moon
Told me a secret one night  

And I rolled off the mountain
Like a rabid pebble  

My journal with its slobbering    
Testimony followed me to this city  

Where I sit at a polished wood desk
And try to write the rigid skyline  

So foreign from my familiar pen
Of bendy willow and rebellious hills  

Daily sirens now intrusive as a fly
In the next room who eventually  

Finds an open window
And goes about its business  

Car horns, some drunken couple in the street
The background music of my new night life  

No more the questing owl
Or tree frog serenade  

No distant coyote heralding kits
Or corn stalks wrestling the wind  

No man coming along the river trail
Smiling with fish in hand  

During the dark drug of sleep
The mind forgets such folly  

But in the ramp of dream
The whippoorwill calls me  

To the edge
Of almost there