---

Perpetual midnight under an arbour of Bella Donna.

Between the jammy toes of Michelangelo.

In a hatbox at the back of Julia's cupboard.

Eternal midnight behind Io's sulphur mansion.

Beheld by a company of fussing autocrats.

Beside an ice-battered winter's moonset.

Lovers in lockstep, on the floes of their bedding,

and it's forever midnight, oozing like Omaha crude

from a family plot of an unkempt cemetery.

A dog barks at the ridiculous

while the sleeper turns and turns again

in always-midnight's tameless convulsions.

Midnight ad infinitum, worries gathering wool,

sleep abandoned, a grey mouse home from the hills,

high lonesome raised to a greater order.

---

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been broadcast and performed globally.