4 A.M. by Tim Seibles

I caught the last great caravan of clouds.

City night. Sky like the inside of a skillet

and bright as ghosts, they crossed – not slowly

but unhurried – as if remembering the way

by feel, the way you might touch the wall

of a dark hall at a friend’s house late, moving

toward the back porch where you heard the Junebugs

unbuttoning their brass jackets. September.

September: another good summer gone and me

another season older with these streets

wet from a small storm that woke me

to see silver clouds drawn along the sky.

But before that I had been dreaming: a box

of bottles on the back seat of a car, sunlight

sassing the windshield. A hitchhiker

wearing the bluest baseball cap

you ever saw. I guess I had been

driving and somehow money

was involved, but neither of us knew

how much. We knew the police

were hiding in the church. “But look

how it is,” he aid, “The road,

I mean, and wide,” and the wind stuttered

in the spidery weeds while the asphalt stirred

like a dark sheet under which someone

sleeping had turned over and then,

it was a river much wider than a road,

with the air barely brushing the trees

the way you might touch the hair of someone

you loved once, stumbling into her

beneath the marquee after a movie. It was

hard smiling the brief embrace, seeing her walk

away, because her walk was the reason

you had tried to meet her five Junes ago-

her smiling voice, the almost sleepy grace

in her gait: you remember scolding yourself

for wanting again: you already believed

she would pass through you life –

which she did – like the good season

of a late hour, like a brightness

opening the dark by feel,

the way a blindfolded boy looks

for his friends in his unlit basement –

the quiet so thick he begins to think

they are gone completely which, in face,

they are: having one by one

slipped out the back door

where, after some giggles,

they catch the sunset

rubbing brass into their blue jackets

and decide to just go home

while he traces the walls,

the dusty sofa, the smooth plank

of the ironing board, not knowing his hands

would eventually find the differences

between what moves, what stays and what

was never really there at all.