Setting suns glow upon the poison bears
with a tenth of the majesty used to create them.
All days we lived on the river were punctuated by a weird light,
as the air swallowed us along with the insects.
The water from which the sky abstained was
listless and encumbered by giant wispy fish.
Now there is dust and there are wings and goats here, and our time on rooftops
is typical of our dispositions:
wide
and lost
and illiterate.
I awoke in the dark, while the winter went through the trash,
and with vibrant birds along its back,
fell upon the prairie.
The glass shuddered and the house leaned into the wind.
I never saw the uncertain scuffles of the snow in the evening, with the TV on,
smoking and cleaning the cataracts
that disguise my general description.
And now I know you’re awake- your light is on at 5 am,
while everything else is scolding the dead,
the same wind with you as with me.
People fall like the ends of days,
and all that autumn we carefully chose our words and crawled
about after the lights were out.
Science project skies hung low over the mountains
as the rain showed itself sliding down the front range.
We only looked at each other sideways,
and saw nothing but the things that were no longer there-
the flicker of our audio/visual lives faltered and film strips snapped on the lawn.
As the snows then swiftly descended, our eyes grew tired, our backs grew sore,
and everything spoken was silenced.
Then, in the penitentiary dawn, I laid down in the tall grass,
among the insects and creeping all-of-it.
I laid down, pulled the prairie upon me,
and slept ‘til the springtime.
Born and raised in southern Minnesota, Jeff Gunderson is alive and well and living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He is currently a graduate student and often tries to make his work sound interesting, to varying degrees of success.