Note: Ah, the Peach Tree

Below the short contrail of a quick jet,
Wind whipped night mists over neighborhood roofs.
No one is ever more idle than me.

The boring world is weirder and vaster
Than the most imaginative epic.
It is also, mostly, empty of death.

Both are reasons it’s called unpoetic,
But what if we avoided temptation
And forgot about counterfactuals,

Dropped those melancholy evocations
Of world-and-self that make a single life
Loom large, and focused on experience?

The clouds are never the same in the sky.
The sky never stops altering its light.
Despite all that, there’s only day and night.

Underground, cavers say, not even day,
From which they deduce there’s also not night.
They’re not wrong, but they’re also not that bright.

These lines are all I have left of not-night,
Its mist, its contrails, its neighborhood roofs.
No one has ever experienced proof.