After Sleep the Wild Morning

glory's uninterrupted vine

describes a furtive turning on barbed

wire-the tendril tightening

like a python on its prey, disclosing

over and over the startled 'oh' in ownership.

All night my body

held its tentative

place like a marker in the latest bedside

novel. Now I take up my life mid-

sentence- wending

syntax, drifting ellipses, the irresistible

punctuation of a sometime

lover. Nothing keeps. After sleep

I savor the morning's sweet

evictions: a disturbance

of warblers: silence conquered by

birdsong, birdsong

the eloquent pause wherein silence

takes its breath. After sleep this antique

question: how long can one live

within the body like a stale guest

room, stock-still, neat as a pin, and un-

frequented? In diffuse light, only

slowly opens: the long body

of work, the mouth

of the flower-song-valve-the latent

chamber closed to those I fear

would name me.

The embrace of the bindweed-

though graceless, some say -

speaks counterclockwise

volumes: after sleep revise

the wild morning, take to the necessary

hedges, the precious

wayside, take

hurtful possession of your vicious twisting

vine. Stumbling into thirty,

I become my own

prey, an utterance doubling

back on itself, entwined with the furtive

turning of the past. After sleep

the leaving road contrives

to keep me

slippery, drifting, ill-

defined. The convolvulus

dilates and acquires.

I live from myself like a suitcase.