Elegy at Dusk

Trees dress in onyx & glow-worms.

Beauty devours with or without the lamp on—

Nightjars eat silk moths & mosquitoes.

Over the rail of the deck

Two raccoons sniff out rotted apple cores.

Pale stalks of field grass go away from the forest,

A kind of flame.

A gravel road beat down to dust,

So unlike ash, though, bodies

Capable of both. No more shooting stars. Only rock

Doomed for this world.

One less night to memorize the sky, dim anthologies—

Darkness called darkness

Everywhere between.

Matthew Wimberley is a Starworks Fellow and MFA candidate at New York University. A finalist for the 2012 Narrative 30 Below Contest, and semifinalist for the Slope Edition Chapbook Contest, his writing has appeared in Rattle, Puerto Del Sol, The Paris-American and Connotation Press, where his poems were introduced by Dorianne Laux. Wimberley grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains with his two dogs and spent March and April of 2012 driving across the country. A Localist poet, he currently resides in Brooklyn where he is completing his first book length manuscript All the Great Territories.