Crepuscule with Bourbon and Cigar
On the patio, smoking a cheap cigar,
sipping Wild Turkey over ice.
8:00 pm, eighty degrees,
slapping my first mosquito of the season.
I spent the first half of my day at the office,
grinding my metal teeth.
But last light falling through cottonwood
lights a pink peony in a white vase.
I think of late October,
when I was last out here,
hornets drunk and dying,
crawling over falls,
the long sodden winter that followed.
I’ll die some night of no regret,
but not this one. Clematis climbing
up red cedar fence.
Ice cubes melting in bourbon.
Sun sinking lower by degree.
My first tobacco in three years,
and the nightjar swoops over the
darkening sky.
How wonderful to be
old at last, nothing to prove,
most of the anger washed away.
I can barely see the white contrail
of a jet disappearing in the west.
Andy Roberts handles finances for disabled veterans in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in A Gathering Of The Tribes, American Life In Poetry, Atlanta Review, Fulcrum, Lake Effect, and Slipstream.
