Open Mic

I didn't hear the poets
at the Open Mic tonight
--a previous engagement--
but imagined them there
in the smokeless colored light,
the weave of the microphone
too strange and too close.
I imagined, too, the poems
that they read or recited,
careful words about fathers, mothers,
wives, husbands, children, strangers,
flowers, beer, politics, skies,
the homeless couple walking
slowly toward their tent hidden,
for now, in the trees beneath the Interstate,
walking in the cool October twilight
that is like a warm quilt
compared to the coming winter
out of doors, the mixed martial arts
studio, in which the red-
and-black-uniformed lawyers
and construction workers and
secretaries try to beat each other
into submission,
the train's call along the valley,
the white noise of wheels on the highway,
the roar of jet engines that
murmur from thousands of feet
overhead, the children's voices,
speaking Spanish as they play
in the sand of an abandoned
volleyball court, the singsong
rhythms of the night bugs.
I sat and watched and listened
--waiting for my previous engagement--
to some of what the poets spoke
into the weave of the microphone.