Night Vision
Driving home on ice-bitten road,
my headlights probing like a blind-man’s fingers,
the night trembling with snow, my boy
blissfully asleep in his magic chair
They appeared from the abyss
as if projected by the moon,
their legs flowing silently through the snow,
a herd of deer, fleeing remembered guns.
Leaping in plumes of electricity,
embracing us in soft brown flesh,
implicating me in my own breaths
and every snow that falls unseen.
Their eyes seemed to know me from long ago,
their leafy heads nodding as if in prayer.
We swung in one motion, relentless, pure,
then they curved beneath the night and disappeared.
When my son stirred, I could not tell
who had dreamed and who had been awake.
I only knew we were safe and blessed,
and I had never lived and would never die.
Sean Lause has published fiction in The Mid-American Review and poetry in Poetry International, The Minnesota Review, Writer’s Journal, Epicenter, The Mother Earth International Journal, European Judaism, Frog Pond and The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Sean teaches courses in Shakespeare, Composition and Speech at Rhodes State College in Lima, Ohio.