FIVE O FIVE
says the insect light of the digital clock,
and in the leaching dark I watch him sleep,
his eyes turned inward, his walk begun
down the nerve-lit alleys of his body.
I dream that he dreams a boy flying over
the ochre fields and the tumbled corpus
of foothills, both father and mother, the tangled
landscape of his making, lifting
now into wind-chipped mountains, outcrop and spire.
He starts, as at a rattlesnake, starts
noticing, starts listening
to the slow music the rocks tease out
from the tuned columns of air.
Art, we call it, the old
second person singularto be,
itsthou still intimate and absent.
Would it be better love
to stop dreaming him? In somnia. In gray exile,
better only to praise
his solitude where I cannot follow.
From there, airborne in sleep, the river
etches the valley with a branching tree. Its delta
is the sky, where the first green reaches when
the sun strikes. Its current returns him, rocks him to wake
in his breathing; landlocked in his
skin now, bone-bound at my side, he opens his eyes.
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