Sleep

What I want for life is constant life
Every night sleep ruins me 
My thoughts are always speaking back
I wake up in the night concerned
For your house and your belongings

I thought the sense of being released 
From one interval into another
Depended on another house
And sleeping in another house 
Changed the substance of my sleep

This new sleep would tire me
I woke up in the dark and thought
My life would stay there in that room
But going home the feeling stayed
The room stayed in the atmosphere
Time kept stretching out, called back to me 
And calling back I saw it gone

It is frozen this way and I have to recover 
All my thoughts of love and danger
Nothing left except one thought
A thought that erases itself
Must make me innocent of it

Being Tolstoy’s Wife

walking with my head bowed, like a barge hauler 
embarrassed to have made an effort
I have embarrassment everywhere
and blush myself to tears
applying myself, throwing myself down the stairs

at the mercy of these tough children
carried like babies through the abbey
carried like laughter from the back of the room
Leo blushes in our boat
he says his life is bad but I know it is good

The Wheel of Day

The night was a portal
The night was of a different material
Owing to the breeze and the lilies

Bright rays crossed the air 
From the surface of the sun
If I was standing on the sun
I could see across it to the planet 

In my eye the rays went round the cone

The eye contained the distance of the ray 

The ray absorbed the distance of the air
The distance filled and clear with sun
And all was sunshine on the sun

*

To delay your exit 
I told you about this
but you who were pregnant with imagination 
were withdrawing from my eye
and seemed an apparition that advancing
across the garden cannot make progress
the petal of a purple flower 
that moves just farther than the door

We were not just one person
Soon after waking I remembered 
soon after I had been asleep
waking in fear of who I was
yet who I was had been obscured 
by life’s fragile barriers.
Of knowledge I expected less 
but still expecting more than I received 
held onto you and gradual life

*

There was time to say it 
What I wanted to tell you
But what I had forgotten
Saying I had said. It was the first
Time you had heard it
Confused by wine and sleep 
I was repeating what I heard
Unaware of what I said 
And cold with fear, I practiced 
Every day to live

*

Those sisters, when I look at them, it seems
Snakes decorate their hair 
And standing at the bank I see they exit
Into water

Yes, in the middle of your city
I thought I saw you with your daughters

My eye was a target
As one sun sees everything on earth
But larger suns approach it