Night Bird by Douglas Cole

At three A.M. you'd think
the streets were empty,
not the lone figure walking
beneath the automatic
blinking of stoplights,
the faces of surprise
caught behind frost-gleaming
windows of abandoned cars,
and I think, why dream
the void, dissolution
of the world and self,
as though the shut eye
of a dreaming god
awakes to snuff us out?
Rather, the fog slides
in and we press through,
mind like a bud
in the soil of the skull,
or the night breaking
open to dawn.