A space winks open in the night
with me inside, sitting up in bed.
I watch your closed face,
your musty breaths on my arm
like something I’m stealing.
My empty mind
begins abstracting the night
and there is not even the sound of a car
on the main road, no human intent
on going somewhere,
taking care of something.
In the next room, the fridge
groans for a few minutes
and on the edge of hearing,
low frog calls
like pinballs around the lake.
Your mind is elsewhen,
your body just a cell going about its business.
The frogs and the fridge go about theirs too
but I have snagged
on something.
Unable to see objects as I’m used to,
losing my train of thought,
I pull on sweatpants.
It seems to take centuries
for them to evolve to fit my legs.
When I open the front door
the moon
it’s taken over, conducting the night.
I wander for a time, and each tree and rock
looks enraptured, brightly whispering to it
but when I stare, they hush themselves
as if caught. The night becomes
this feeling: not knowing
what the renewed silence
has just covered over.
When I turn back to the cabin, a stag
stands mutely on the doorstep.
He doesn’t move as I softly
retrace my steps over tree roots
until I can see the fur on his chest
rising and falling.
This hunted, naked thing
is conscious every second
of what he is; each second
beats, and then
is a second less.
Together we enter that trans-
personal space from which I usually
avert my eyes. I am
becoming vast,
more than I am supposed to be.
More
and I get the sense
more
that his dark eyes
have been with me longer than
I can remember.
They are a lake from which
I am just now surfacing,
in a spot of moonlight.
My tongue thickens
into tree bark. Speech becomes
just a campfire creation story
I heard as a child.
As the spaces between thoughts
stretch longer, the moon’s whisper
implies what it really is.
Its phases flip by as I search its face,
seeing time as a rock does
before it sets.
After the glow fades
from his neck, the stag
drops my gaze and lifts his hoof
to take a step, as if it must be
correctly placed.
I have taken part in night’s conspiracy
and have been heard.
What I said, and who said it to me before—
I am a knowing thing, and so
I cannot know.