from The Ambition of Ghosts:  I. Remembering into Sleep

I. Separation Precedes Meeting The cat so close to the fire I smell scorched breath. Parents, silent, behind me, a feeling of trees that might fall. Or dogs. A poem, like trying to remember, is a movement of the whole body. You follow the fog into more fog. Maybe the door ahead divides the facts from natural affection. How can I know. I meet too many in every mirror. 2. When I was little, was I I? My sister? A wolf chained, smothered in green virtues? Slower time of memory. Once I’ve got something I lie down on it with my whole body. Goethe quotations, warm sand, a smell of hay, long afternoons. But it would take a road would turn, with space, in on itself, would turn occasion into offer. 3. For days I hold a tiny landscape between thumb and index: sand, heather, shimmer of blue between pines. No smell: matchbook. Sand as schematic as Falling into memory, down, with my blood, to the accretions in the arteries, to be read with the whole body, in the chambers of the heart. The light: of the match, struck, at last. 4. Concentration: a frown of the whole body. I can’t remember. Too many pasts recede in all directions. Slow movement into Distant boots. Black beetles at night. A smell of sweat. The restaurant, yes. You’ve no idea how much my father used to eat. Place thick with smoke. Cards. Beer foaming over on the table. And always some guy said I ought to get married, put a pillow behind my eyes and, with a knowing sigh, spat in my lap. 5. The present. As difficult as the past, once a place curves into Hips swinging elsewhere. Castles in sand. Or Spain. Space of another language. Sleep is a body of water. You follow your lips into its softness. Far down the head finds its level 6. Tropisms Inward, always. Night curls the clover leaf around its sleep. Tightly. The bodies of the just roll, all night, through subterranean caves which turn in on themselves. Long tunnel of forgetting. Need of blur. The air, large, curves its whole body. Big hammering waves flatten my muscles. Inward, the distances: male and female fields, rigorously equal. 7. The drunk fell toward me in the street. I hope he wasn’t disappointed. Skinned his sleep. November. And a smell of snow. Quite normal, says the landlord, the master of rubbish, smaller and smaller in my curved mirror. I have un- controllable good luck: my sleep always turns dense and visible. There are many witches in Germany. Their songs descend in steady half-tones through you. 8. You’ll die, Novalis says, you’ll die following endless rows of sheep into your even breath. Precarious, like Mozart, a living kind of air, keeps the dream spinning around itself, its missing core. Image after image of pleasure of the whole body deepens my sleep: fins. 9. Introducing Decimals A dream, like trying to remember, breaks open words for other, hidden meanings. The grass pales by degrees, twigs quaver glassily, ice flowers the window. Intimate equations more complicated than the coordinates of past and Germany. The cat can’t lift its paw, its leg longer and longer with effort. A crying fit is cancelled. An aria jelled in the larynx. Nothing moves in the cotton coma: only Descartes pinches himself an every fraction must be solved.