Ode to Sleep

It is when the heart and the clotted blood betray the word-

weary patient

When the tooth of a dead horse terrifies even the man in the

castle

And the leaves oftrees knowing their place on the wind

Rattle their dead-waking rattles

It is when earthquakes shake the moon and from the sleep-

er's hand

Falls the uninhabitable sphere to roll upon the waves of the

sea

That is when I sleep

It is true

There are days when the infected sky climbs onto our brows

Where each thought buries its nameless skull

And the journey of the body is the enticement of clouds to

enter a world of vapor and nocturnal stones

That is when the moon comes to rest on the cheek of a

young girl's face

When every river leaves its bed by night

To seize for itself the low-lying fog

That and to trace for good the lines in a man's face

When they appear as journeys to distant planets

That is when I sleep

And the waves grow warm through exposure to the stars

With the death of each fish a message is sent to another galaxy

Listen

The dead would rise like sleepwalkers in full view of the city

But their graves remind them too much of lifeboats picking

up time-weary angels

Their graves which open to the sky never stop moving long

enough to come square with the world

But the sleep of windows moving about at night

Of flesh carrying light to the center of the earth where it

lives the life of bone and hair

The sleep of water consumed by the soul

That is the sleep that carries us

The endless sleep of the terminally ill

Directing their love toward dead constellations

The perpetual sleep of pyramids pointing to the sky

When kings sick with tedium have disappeared into the walls

When the eyelids have failed to defeat the shadows

And the heart kissed by echoes has turned to dust