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.


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