Silence so deep you can hear

that moth combing its antennae.

The trees are asleep on their feet, oblivious.

A single leaf yawns, turns over.

At the hint of a breeze the grass

pulls the bedclothes tighter.

I should mention how the moonlight

looks but I can barely keep my eyes open

so instead I’ll say what it sounds like:

like a dining room in a

long-foreclosed mansion where the finest

china has just been laid out on

the finest tablecloth by the

ghost of the late butler

who nodded off while looking

for the spoons.

The secret joy of the hour

is that anything could happen

and nothing ever does.

Kurt Luchs has poems published or forthcoming in Into the Void, Triggerfish Critical Review, Right Hand Pointing, Roanoke Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Antiphon, Emrys Journal, and The Sun Magazine, among others, and won the 2017 Bermuda Triangle Poetry Prize. He founded the literary humor site TheBigJewel.com, and has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as writing comedy for television (Politically Incorrect and the Late Late Show) and radio (American Comedy Network). Sagging Meniscus Press recently published his humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny), which has been nominated for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. His poetry chapbook, One of These Things Is Not Like the Other, is forthcoming. More of his work, both humor and poetry, can be found at kurtluchs.com.

This poem was first published in Fjords Review.