Numinous Snapshots

Could I have been that boy

Circled in black,

The one in the photo album

Gathering dust in the junk shop?

And is that snapshot me atop the tenement

Of cold-water flats,

That kid with the long pole

Stabbing at the pigeons beneath the stormy sky,

Trying to get them back in their cages?

That couldn’t be me, could it?

I was never that old

Dressing the holiday department store window

Pinning the puple robes around

The Three Kings

Bearing gifts?

Strange life,

If so.

But…

Time to clock some cloud miles,

Up through the exit-break in the nebula

Where the graveyard of cosmic dust,

Time’s forever-evening-opacity slumbers

Until another patient dawn beckons.