Christopher Todd Matthews

A pink belch-scoop of cloud urging itself across treetops pink at evening

A teenager in a towel in the suburban distance stepping from the tree line onto

A long driveway and seeming to watch the house like a psychopath with the sun

Pushing through the little triangles his cape makes with his hands on his hips


My daughter and I urge these things to be more than they are

More than they probably are


At night a distant train moans its spacecraft whale-song across the burr of neighborhoods

And really it felt like, My god, the mystery approacheth

Somewhere in the hot folds of Virginia night every night these days there is a great

Ping of metal striking metal

Like demons building their old-fashioned soul-hauling railroad but probably not


We listen and look

For signs.  Time was, she was a sign.  Now

She helps.  If only every new tenuous promise of evidence would become, like her,


Real, and join us in looking.

Things rasp in the dark ideas of the trees


Things leap from the throats of the hedges

But only we labor, like this.