Can You

Can you love the dawn and hate the day? I do.
“Addicted to the beginnings of relationships,”
as I’ve been told. And told. And told. The new
light looks as something else when it first hits,
something more like Catherine standing up
across a strangered room, that promising look
she had before the promises, still stuck
with sweetness to her face in my notebook
of pre-day ecstasies. I love the feel
of gray seeping into black – what it represents:
the casting-out that could occur—and the real,
truant world opening, before it grows dense
with light and the need for endings, setting free
that inkling some lasting love might come to me.

Christian Barter