Night washes in, the woody bare-melodiousness 
of coffee or dark chocolate. It turns over and takes 
a deep breath under its mauve-purple comforter. I sit 
still enough not to disturb it—
					   a night already 
with a full palette on its brush, thus more layered, 
like a Russian novel’s plot or Dostoyevsky’s 
near-death experience, a tsar’s practical joke with 
four years in Siberia to get over the shock, 

and the woods I can imagine through the permafrost 
anything but lovely and dark as trunks sway and bark creaks. 
Or is that just the night turning again? Or maybe 
the raven near the top of a tall, wavering pine? 

* Title is from the title poem in John Ashbery’s collection A Wave (Penguin, 1985).

Poet’s Note

My nocturnal predilections continue, quieter in this poem but with both their lighter and darker tones moving back and forth in competing undercurrents. Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Showy Evening” appears again in my work, almost as a leitmotif, though coming on Dostoyevsky’s heels surprised me. One of those instances where the unconscious brings what it does? The raven was actually a daytime observation, but one early enough on a windy morning, with the duskiness of its feathers and tenacity of its hold on a branch, to sway back to the pre-dawn hours.

Jonathan Yungkans

is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Prize and was published in February 2021 by Tebor Bach.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ It Belongs to Each of Us Like a Blanket by Jonathan Yungkans, Winner of “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge (Issue 15, September 2022)

⚡ Le Grand Matin by Yungkans, a Finalist in MacQ’s Triple-Q Writing Challenge (Issue 11, January 2022)

⚡ La Porte, ekphrastic poem in MacQ’s special Christmas Eve issue (10X, December 2021)

⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus author’s notes on the poems and on the form, in Issue 10 of MacQ (October 2021)

⚡ Lawful and Proper, poem in Rise Up Review (Fall 2020)

⚡ Cadralor in the Key of F-Sharp as It Cuts into My Spine, in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)

⚡ I’d Love to Cook Like Hannibal Lecter [video], read by the poet at an event sponsored by Moon Tide Press (10 October 2019) celebrating the anthology Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror

⚡ Saving the Patient, poem in The Voices Project (18 January 2018)