Closing Time

Lee Hittner-Cunningham

This bar is the kind of loud and crowded that makes
me sick to my stomach, disoriented, and he with beer
in hand is telling me that music is the height of reason,
the height of mathematics and maybe that’s true but

         what is music if not desire and what is desire
         if not a knife between the ribs and I say what’s
         reasonable about that, what’s reasonable about
         walking around with a knife between your ribs 

I say. But then I am a creature against reason: no one
else put that knife there, not even God. You turn up
the cuffs of your shirt and I watch your wrists under
lamplight, the blue of your veins. And the noise now 

         is beginning to be too much for me, the surface
         of the table shifting beneath my hands. I want
         to go home, but I can only make my way
         stumbling to the room I’m sleeping in these 

days as the birds make their pre-dawn noise. I want
to go home, to the house where as a sleepless kid I’d
throw open the screen door at four in the morning to
greet those birds, to call out to them in my own

         raucous voice, so too I, so too I! Now I wish
         they’d quiet down; they sound too much like
         me, their beaks turned up to the still-black sky,
         as if this time, maybe, the sun won’t rise.