On a Bridge Before Dawn, Recollecting Last Night's Rain

you friends friends friends
hurled sweetly
three hundred thousand deep
jewels bursting on the drive home pavement
in the high beams
wrapping the backroad car
in poetry demands

stepping in from the broad
sheet of blank canvas deluge,
did we join 
ordinarily
in dishwashing the slender volume
of preparing for sleep?

the roof sounds of steady gale
call all over this skin
and ease into dreams
(steady Cadillacs on
easy broken highways
filled with vacancy)

the lathe of sleepwake, sleepwake...
an old hand is working on
this body with a tested gouge,
the soul pickles in an oak barrel
with loose slats,
weeping into the gaps,
breathing the joy air of
a roughed-out container

this palette consciousness
of Wow
Flowering Gratitude
Fall On My Knees Simplicity,
all the Bestest things
to pallbear our dancing days
across the river dark
at appointed-by-no-one time

my old friends with Big Sky beards
coarse wilderness rivers
women with strong joy and laments,
hop on a prayer-bead string
and meander on down
the backroads,
lead me
with sweet songs
of a place n' time

a smooth cobalt bottle
eased through the rapids
and quietly turns
in the stillwater and last
moonlight

I pick up its emptiness
and turn it out
on the sand banks -
the gentle heft
of its thousand lifetimes
ripening towards
this ordinary today.