Michael Haeflinger

Commandments

Night is a basket of baby mice,

pink and blind and finite.

And day is a cauldron of witches brew

bubbling over the rim.

All words should come in order,

this is the first commandment.

The second is to love

and the third, to obey.

Countesses and nobodies

line country lanes

to steal the eyes of princes,

assumed to seek counsel

of ancestors.

But the dead see only what we see:

angel ledges and fountain pigeons,

notebooks full of directions,

night that thirsty cat mewing

in the glassy alley.

They float between the space between,

in the quiet moments when the tea

disappears into morning steam,

in the late afternoon when the telephone

loses all its will to ring.

Michael Haeflinger lives in Tacoma, WA in the long shadow of Mt. Rainier.  Links to his work and a gallery of his visual art can be found at michaelhaeflinger.com.