FINAL AUBADE
Blue moonlight fills the open window.
Where are you, old friend? Your sideways wink,
your rictus grin? A self can be, let’s face it, dull,
so I tend a little toward you with these tricks,
these tics and spasms. The summer night lies easily
upon Lake Michigan. A dog barks somewhere
out in the afterlife, the afterglow.
______
Hypnic jerk: a sudden feeling of falling while drifting
to sleep. Spectrophobia: the abnormal and persistent fear
of mirrors, of seeing one's own face reflected in them.
It is sometimes related to a fear of ghosts or the undead.
(derived from the Latin spectrum, n. specio, an appearance,
form, image of a thing; an apparition, a spectre).
______
Reflect. Learning how the world is lost leaves a lot
to learn. The brain’s momentary panic—that this is death—
jolts the body awake. The trapdoor springs—the maw
leaps up—the snap. But you’re just like that alive.
So here's the drift of it, the burn. The mind swims
back into the room where it's still a summer night,
still Chicago. I guess to extinction I still prefer this errant
electricity arced between us. The cat at my feet decides
my resurrection’s worth opening one eye for a look.
______
The face staring back from the poem is my own, and when
I fall through its surface, bright circles widen and disappear
as I sink. The streetlamp beyond the glass dances
with emissaries from the underworld. I never loved you.
Dawn is drawn out of the east like a warm bath on a weekend
morning. The body breathes beneath the cold white sheet.
Aaron Baker is the author of Posthumous Noon (Gunpowder Press), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. His first book, Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin), won the Bakeless Prize in Poetry and the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. He is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing program at Loyola University Chicago.