“In the selected letters and smell of soaped skin, there” by Tony Mancus

we are grab-assing and tired. The color this night once
was when young could not be replicated. Take
any brush. The words go missing, too.
Essentially a man-made disaster, all acts of memory.

The stars fall down and don’t get back up
—oh how hard the engineer assigned to set
the pattern back in the sky has to wonder.
The color the night was once: young and limber. We are

there inside it, fighting sleep off with every inch
of our bored bodies. They finally refuse
to let us last awake. We are left

in this dream to waste time and watch the bats—
darker spots within the darkness—dip and swerve
to touch the face of the water. Another form
of resistance there in our shutting eyes

mars the idea of never. To wake in the morning
and bathe in the lake, a new
category of life strapped there onto our wet skulls.