A friend said this was beautiful,
to imagine that a month offered
vision, as though it were
a platform
over a canyon
we really could find
in our time.
I want to know now
what was beautiful, I mean,
beyond the phrase,
when the usual came
from the namesake, the two-faced
deity lurking there behind
all our commerce,
and I thought only
of beginnings, of plans.
In the view from January,
I missed the ending that came
as you sought to end your
sad young theatre of masks
no one ever tried to look past.
I am always doing that now, looking
back, discovering something else in
the unchanging
turning
face always fixed
except for what keeps disappearing
as the cloud cover passes over the mountain ahead.
–
Thomas Allbaugh’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Writing on the Edge, Broken Skyline, and Relief. He is an associate professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, where he teaches composition and creative writing. Apocalypse TV, his first novel, is available from eLectio Publishers.