It
is late. In one hour she must go.
Two sleepers rest, one
on edge of the other, fazing
with slow heart pulse
into
and then out
of each body, and
sleep's midgate.

But for now, you are content not
to dig completely down
into slumber, and
not to rise.

A dreamer, when sleep presents
a road, follows it.
He does this with every road.
Standing at a fork,
he may travel both turnings
until he comes to another fork,

where he magnifies and dilutes
down every split,
and his travel
divides him.

Sleep
coils inward, root-like,
until
in the earth; until every
vantage looks
out,

and this is wake.

The
roads travel
the way fire
travels the branchings, the cross-hatchings,
the bent joints matched
when one has gathered small branches
for the starting of a fire.

In other words, a dreamer
grows and burns
a tree.

Likewise, when waking splits sleep
into one spine
with leaf,

you, who were dream
and dreamt,
arrange behind you
a twigfire
both reverie
and nightmare.

One can map the dream
by following needles
through
all of the splittings,
the choices of sleep

until your fingers
feel pierced
in each branching.

But better, don't.

There is a song
that kills you as you sing it.

This is the song.

In the way the twigfire
takes into itself
the love of the fire
for its own
burning,

memory, too
takes itself into one hour
each hour,
like a road
that is cut and turned
into many branches.

One memory, that is the same hour,
lying by a woman,
grows from seed;

its branchings twist among yours
so much like oak,
it sets a bird out into each limb.

That bird's trill you hear in the feeling bones
resonate toward her with a force
that must break time
free of you, free
on verge of the world.

While you listen
to her breathing:

That song
feels itself so much bird
it flutters,
testing itself in your breast
under her breast, a fledgling,
knowing only one instinct.

I think she knows
a fire is burning

but can not smell it in your hair,
where her cheek and nose
rest.

Your chest, breathing, lifts
both of you
past the hour.

You don't want it to go.

But its instinct is right.

Its nest is burning,
burning with the thousand interweaving
scattered twigs' original locations.

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