Night Detail

No sleep. Mortar the color

and stink of the river

ghosts up from flare-lit dirt,

a pipelayer sloughs dust

that pivoting helmet-beams

catch in slow sift.

The eye's restlessness

not as faith or prayer

but consent to the encounter

as a column of swarming halogen,

moth-chinked, wind-puppeted,

roams the scaffolding then rears

into darkness, the contingent darknesses,

over hills, past men's shadows.