If I’d Stayed Inside
I’d have missed the distant massing
of clouds plowing north, a continent
of ice and down its center a furrow
of blackness so absolute everything
moving inside me stopped. Swipes
of white are all that are left, the moon
discarding guise after guise. We’ve all
become who we’re going to be and we see
some nights—my neighbors and I—moments
we might have lived had we chosen differently
when there was time. We’re nagged at night
by someone we cherished stepping from shadows
asking to be seen before moving on. East
of my house, three blinking towers broadcast a signal
so precise its position requires a decimal point. Find
what we lack. Isn’t that why we built this town?
Now we settle for whatever’s next, clouds in motion,
hideous or frail, the moon—undecided—rooted in sky.
Scott Davidson grew up in Great Falls, Montana, and worked for Montana’s Poets-in-the Schools program after graduate school. His poems have appeared in Potomac Review, Poets/ Painters/ Composers, Cirque, Shadow Road Quarterly, and the anthology Crossing the River: Poets of the Western United States. Look for new poems in Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing in early 2018. He lives with his wife in Missoula, where he’s customer service manager and internationally featured blog writer for an organic soap company.
Header photo of moon and clouds by StockSnap, courtesy Pixabay.
