While I was sleeping I heard the half-light
fall across an elegy of itinerant bees.
A heedless pilgrim now I wake into
a little less of me, my body
unbuilding with each breath until
a brisk wind snatches me from the drugged
day, and I stumble through this hive
of a world, each cell a new humming,
each body a new veining that trembles
where I touch it, moon-blind, not of this earth,
where I see after seeing, dreams dissolved
in morning’s borrowed air, every care
streaming through my eyes, a narrow road
breaking on the horizon. Think what you want
about this burning house, this beguiling trial,
we unravel in wave upon wave of light,
living in each other’s story such a short while.
Peter Grandboisis the author of eleven books, the most recent of which is The Three-Legged World (published by Etruscan Press as Triptych with books by poets James McCorkle and Robert Miltner, 2020). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.