Nighttime Page, 11 Feb. 09

It's late, and it's been a long time since I've written.  I managed to send out one chapbook mss. today, and one poetry contest entry to the Florida Review.  I'd determined to get back to my normal submitting self, and hopefully reclaim my writing-more-often self, too.

Here's a poem for today:

Fallen Apples
by Tom Hansen
Wasps at work in the soft  flesh of rotting apples.  Food of the gods,  all day they mine it in busy  hushed movements. I pick up a mushy corpse  one cold morning.  Carefully turn it over.  Its congregation tumbles  into the cupped  bowl of my hand. Dazed, drunk, still  chilled from overnight cold,  they blunder like sleepwalkers  feeling around for the light.  Tiny antennae test my skin  in search of something  now gone. Warmed by my hand,  warmed by the sun,  they stagger and fall into flight.  They scribble orbits  the air erases and whine at last out of sight.