I rose at 2 A.M., as I often do, 
as our ancestors have been said to—
after their first long nap
starting at nightfall—rising to pray
or talk, back when people spent
more hours under covers, bastioned against
the unlit cold. Half asleep, I walked past
the empty guestroom in my dark house, the door
partly closed, wanting, I thought,
a cool glass of water. How miraculous
it was that my bare
feet could find the path 
to the kitchen and not stumble
on the dog or the rug or the jutting
bookcase in the hall; how comfortable
this dark was, how dear, a squared off
compartment of the great dark sweeping
its tide across the globe. And I also thought—
or, felt, really, as I passed,
that something about the angle of the door
seemed purposive, that someone unknown
could be sleeping in that room, which had
briefly housed—after the children left—the various
long dead: friends or uncles and aunts, or my mother
and father, their chests peacefully rising
and falling.    

Maybe I wanted to invite in
someone,  some flimsy
flitting ghost for whom
the room would be a kind of ballast.

I poured my water from the pitcher
in the fridge, that cheery welcomer—
like parents putting on the yellow
porch lights for their kids’ safe entry
late at night—and drank it while my eyes
began their readjustment to the dark,
then  tip-toed past the open door—not quite yet
disappointingly familiar.

Like the dug-out canoe I watched
the fishermen launch on a beach
in Ghana, decades ago. Straight up
the furious moonlit breakers
they rode, madly paddling,
jerked almost vertical, bouncing
out of their seats, then disappeared
in the hollow of the next wave
and bolted up again.
My young anthropologist husband and I
had both been invited
to ride on the second boat that night
and I had said “yes,” fearing my loss
of esteem in his eyes, if I wasn’t
brave. Then, on the beach, the horse
of my terror reared, snorting, frothing,
tossing his head, and would not lower it
until I let my husband go,
and drove to our rented house alone.

The shape of Hokusai’s prodigious wave
opening its jaws incarnates
and revives my long-forgotten cowardice
and fear; the boatmen seem to row
with terror’s stinging spray
in their dot eyes. Yet, the slopes
of swells and boats, the miniature bent
bald heads of the crews, the frosting on
the silkier billows, the snow of the spume—
which seems to be icing the top
of distant Mt. Fuji—all rhythmically repeat
like epic epithets, like history, perhaps, at last,
returning into legend.