Tuesday poem #138 : Beverly Dahlen : "The half-open eye of the moon"

  The half-open eye of the moon over Mission Street

  the scrim-colored sky         blazing shadows on the

  tarmac in the Safeway car park       trees lost in the

  slight breeze over Big Lots     & further up the hill

  lights bite night early now   January still and north

  is north & east of here the continent    to which we

  are thinly connected shifts imperceptibly into dark

  ness ahead of us             while the western heavens

  bloom rosy gray     a late bird gasps and flies away

  veiny branches of       buckeye & cherry at the foot

  of the garden now choked with weeds the emperor

  of which is sticky goosefoot    but little cymbalaria

  lives among mosses and leaves  tiny pinky flowers

  tendrils on the wall

A native of Portland, Oregon, Beverly Dahlen has lived and worked in San Francisco for many years.  Her first three books were republished by Little Red Leaves Editions in 2012; parts of her long open-ended work called A Reading have been published  over the years by various presses.  Beverly Dahlen was a recipient of a 2013 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan