Night Passage
by Sean Sexton
A hundred coyote yips and a heifer’s lowing send
me out from restive sleep—pajamas, jacket, shoved-
on shoes, boring the pasture dark on the side-by-side
through a burning headlamp hole of light. I turn
broad circles searching eyes in the field, fording
ditches, rolling over rises as tiny birds come boiling
out on approach like sparks—every tussock aflame—
in a field filled with countless smutgrass pastiches
stage-crafted onto green, footlit scissor-wrought seas.
And the herd is found camped in a fence-corner—cow/calf-
mannikins—heads a-glitter in tiny lights—some far-flung
like moons that they must be run over to be budged from
their inviolate attitudes of night and always—like any movie-
spooks—all danger drained away back at the entered gate,
nothing to see but the self-same, world—minus light—
that only-ever universe out beyond sight; frog, owl, train:::
creaking, tolling, rumbling just now back home as I write.
Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch. He divides his time between managing a 700-acre cattle operation, painting, and writing. He is author of two chapbooks, and three full volumes of poetry: Blood Writing, Poems, Anhinga Press, 2009, and May Darkness Restore, Poems, Press 53, 2019, and Portals, Poems, Press 53, 2023. He performs regularly at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV, and is on the faculty of the 2024 Southeastern Writers Assn. Conference on St. Simon's Island, GA in June . He was nominated for a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart Prize and received a FL Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2001. He's a board member of the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation and founding event chair of their Annual Poetry and Barbeque held each April, now in its fifteenth year. He also co-founded Poetry and Organ Advent and Lenten Concert Series at Community Church in Vero Beach, FL featuring nine concerts annually attracting poets from all over the US. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016.
