Sleep
Falling asleep you do not traffic in abstractions:
you fashion images in the mind and count them.
You step back from the brink of thought,
from cognitive manipulation, to pure envisioning.
The sheep jump the wall, the skier parses new trails
on the mountain, swooping between spruce trees.
Elizabeth walks through homes she has known:
an old apartment in Chicago, our beloved hovel
on Jane Street, her childhood house in Baltimore.
What’s down this hall, which door is the closet?
Turn on the light, examine the faded wallpaper,
move through the space, feel it, inhabit it.
What’s been subtracted is a kind of pictorial syntax,
the filmic and interpretive operations of the mind
driving the images forward. Or, is that wrong?
You must remember to count the leaping sheep,
to engage the algebraic half of the mind,
which is the left or the right? Does it matter?
Two hemispheres, globe and brain,
night and day, the mad serendipity of it all.
What is the evolutionary purpose of sleep?
What is knowledge? Why are we alive?
Where is this world we find ourselves in?
How can we understand it? Who are we?
Five Stanzas Ending with Virgil Suárez
Down at the crossroads the Devil told me
I’d come too late—he already
gave that guitar to Virgil Suárez.
Crossing the river the ferryman said
business was booming since all the bridges
had been burned by Virgil Suárez.
Throughout Sonora the saguaro were dry
as the ashes of Cuban cigars, each one
carved with the initials of Virgil Suárez.
The name of every author
in the legendary library of Alexandria
was a secret anagram for Virgil Suárez.
Only the extraterrestrials know
that the runic inscriptions of the Nazca plateau
are a self-titled poem by Virgil Suárez.
