Night Tunnel by Robbi Nester

From the Philadelphia Night Train, by Robert Rhodes, contemporary.

Night Tunnel

There are more shades of darkness than of light--
ashy evenings, moonless, muffled by clouds.
The cold blue of December, sharp and bright.
Then there’s the absolute pitch of hurtling, sleepless,
through night on a fast train, an absence
that makes us seek with all our stymied senses
the something we suspect is there,
a suggestive blankness evoking death,
or what we think we know of it,
reminding us of other lives we’ve had
but then forgotten, other deaths.
We lose them, except in snatches,
like old songs. Darkness framed in light
burning just there, around the edges.
This tunnel must resemble death, except
we will remember how it felt to be inside it
when we emerge into the light of the other side.

Robbi Nester

Robbi Nester is the author of an ekphrastic chapbook titled Balance (White Violet, 2012) and other poetry collections. Her work has been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Cimarron Review, Broadsided, Silver Birch Press, Poemeleon, and Inlandia.