4am Cab Ride Poem by Ernest Hilbert

For Matthew Zapruder

You watch the cold bristles and scrawled ghost sheen
Of a full moon on a black bay beside
Refineries corroded by weather.
You want to believe there are old, unseen
Things out there that have long since learned to hide
From us and survive with all we prefer
To ignore or forget in those moments before
The fertile disorder of day reconnects
Us to our public lives. But now, a moon's dry chalk
Marble rolls down the night's drowned throat and lures
The eyes from moon to moon—cruel white collects
Like snow or ash, like milk, mist, or cut stalk,
Gathering of mown meadows; as it must
The heart fills, rasping, as a silo, with dust.