which has just arrived in town
doesn’t want to be known only

for its body. That was yesterday’s
dusk, its thighs in dark nylons

sidling up to anything that moved,
its magenta lips lighting

the next cigarette from the last,
its eyes shutting just when it mattered.

The new dusk, a student of time,
is here to stay. It closes down

all the exits into night. I try
to sidestep relativity, but everything

remains the same. The sun refuses
to circle the earth. When I start

drawing the city around me,
the wind brushes it away

like tumbleweed. The fields recede,
one ice age after another. The desert

rises toward me, holding out its
armfuls of sand. The grains are cells

indistinguishable from bone. The light
is so porous I can turn through

myself as if I weren’t there.
Finally, a dusk whose promise lasts.

–James Doyle,
The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water (2012)
Accents Publishing

More from The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water and James Doyle:

• “Queen Victoria Goes on a Picnic”
• “Fossil Rooms”
• “Schoolgirls”
• “Love Story”
• “Shoveling Tea”

James Doyle is retired, 75 years old, and lives in Ft. Collins, Colorado. His publications include The Governor’s Office, The Sixth Day; The Silk at Her Throat, Einstein Considers a Sand Dune, and Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes. James Doyle’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and others. His poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s PBS radio show, The Writer’s Almanac, and on Poetry Daily. Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry has featured his work, and his poetry has appeared over a dozen times on Verse Daily. His poems have been reprinted in many anthologies, including Prentice Hall’sLiterature: an Introduction to Critical Reading, used in universities across the country.