The real night
Hasn’t yet begun to fall
           Vasko Popa

We enter the sleep of childhood, nights
Filled with dark instructive matter in a land where
Skeletons rain down to enlighten us. Barefoot
In your embroidered chemise, you flutter
From window to window, slamming each casement
On femur and ileum to hinder that education.
In close dark, supine under the crisp duvet
Every dream is a telegram from the limbic brain
That instructs you to practice darkness with the owl,
Picking through the skeletal remains, advises me to check
for all my 32 teeth and to avoid the dead,
The buried life of night which comes on fast in these latitudes.
And in our bed where, asleep or awake, we are unlikely
To find another beginning, a safer form of the verb to be.  

__________________________________________________________

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in Texas with her husband, David and her dog, Marcel Proust. Most recently her work has appeared in 2River View, Cider Press Review, Vol. 6, and Is This Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas, Greenwillow Books, 2004.
E-mail: wcarlisle at vidnet dot net  

__________________________________________________________

home