All night the wind rocks the house,
waking me in my thin sleep,
like a weary subway rider.
There is no-one on the train.
The pillars of an express stop ripple past.
I sleep again.

All night the uncertain moon
flickers in the wind,
on and off, on and off,
even behind closed eyes.
Cold suffuses my spine
as if it were stroked by a finger;
in my mind, my toes,
like after-images of the sun,
pulse to purple, eclipse to black,
then flare again to orange,
as I shift position.
All that activity in my cells
and I don’t want to know about it. Glowing
and darkening...

When I allow myself to wake fully,
it is not surfacing breathless at the place
where light breaks on water, but darkness
opening to darkness, to the strange house
of the exiled child.

Nothing to do but walk the hallway
to the front door, which stands blown open,
as if it had always been. The cat lies calmly,
forepaws folded on the cold terrazzo.    
                
Nothing to do but look for a moment—
as if waiting for the subway doors
to close, when the train has paused
longer than usual at a deserted stop.                

Then to turn the lock, to pick the cat up—
breathing the cold fur at her neck
which smells like snow coming—and return
to my exile, like a child whose parents
are sleeping, still sleeping.

An invisible visitor slipped in
and led you away,
as we closed ranks around your bed,
thinking at last you’re sleeping,
at last some sleep.

After we were shouted out in a swirl of white,
the grenade of tears bursting in my chest,
I came back briefly to admire
his clean work: just your chrysalis
on the bed, like a drained glass
left on a hotel room table.

Now I send memory to the well
with its cup of bone
wanting to fill it to the brim,
but the pump is frozen
and the water is stone.

First you’re not there
sitting on the couch,
then the couch is gone,
the room,
the house.

Light slides in the waving
grasses, like jeweled darning needles
repairing the world! 

And my body-in-the-body, hopeful,
rooted, a well of calm water,
echoing the deep sky,
sends back tiny splashes
of joyful fire.

And my body-in-the-mind—
running, running, running—
races talking streams, leaping them
on slender branches, wind-flung,
and my pilgrim ear scoops up 
its scallop shell of clear sound.

One day, I will be a mirror crazed
out of wholeness,
one day, a mirror
dropped.

But now, my body-in-the-mind
runs like a silver river
over stones, my body-in-the-body,
as if healed and then some, tunes in to
light’s hum.