Jeanne Lohmann: "Questions Before Dark"

                                     Day ends, and before sleep
                                     when the sky dies down, consider
                                     your altered state: has this day
                                     changed you? Are the corners
                                     sharper or rounded off? Did you
                                     live with death? Make decisions
                                     that quieted? Find one clear word
                                     that fit? At the sun's midpoint
                                     did you notice a pitch of absence,
                                     bewilderment that invites
                                     the possible? What did you learn
                                     from things you dropped and picked up
                                     and dropped again? Did you set a straw
                                     parallel to the river, let the flow
                                     carry you downstream?

"Questions Before Dark" by Jeanne Lohmann. Text as published in The Light of Invisible Bodies (Daniel and Daniel Publishers, 2015).

Art credit: "Floating Downstream...," pinhole photograph by Scott Speck. From the caption: "This is a 90 second 4x5 pinhole camera exposure, looking down a flowing stream in the Spruce Knob Recreation Area, in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia [USA].... The pinhole camera was placed about an inch above a rock amid the flowing water. It was a breezy day, so the trees overhead, in addition to being stretched near the frame edges, were moving. Lichens can be seen on the rocks on the cliff wall to the right."