An excerpt from
Standing Wave
by Robert Allen
Sonnet from Jimmie Walker Swamp
The declined summer seemed to call for white wine,
then the sun sank and I was lost in time. Night takes
half my hours, lately, and the reading light burns
the page until I am insensible. What seemed light
is dark, the dark a riot of burning. The ferris wheel
in town blares its incandescence; the stage show
can be heard for two kilometres. I can't know
much of the world beyond. Land stretches to the limits
of morning, much as, when I was a child,
the map went to the edge, then kept going, to the wild,
unlettered future, as shadowed as the past. Half
my life has been knowing the dark earth of here,
and not the promised secrets of the universe. I have it
all here in my head. I don't know what it's worth.