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.