In Nights Smothered.

The darkest days have darker nights yet there oft are dreams

Nor a stalking terror nor obmutescent grue but

A vision sublime, a thin-shrouded vestment of things as love, beauty,

Which our minds in dazzling phantasms adorn,

Knowing which, we are still led but little astray

In facetiousness, on arguments metaphysical,

In abstruseness most detached and unextended,

To ponder whether such have support,

Or are but a bitty space in the finally-opened Matryoshka,

For feeling that, they are our supports,

They are our wishes made full within as the soul is drunk,

Prayers,

They are the ribs of God arrayed celestially

While under sounds in the deep channel of the universe

Beats of an eternal heart—

And so I dreamed in nights smothered with blackness

A homecoming and a beautiful bride,

The damaged pride of youth, a bit shabbily used,

Within the bleakness swirling jags of light.

She is lean and sickly with the trampled plant’s vigor

But come here at last my due—what broad path ended

In the brambles years ago we’ve tracked again,

Out of the dampness and chomping-underfoot loess,

Pine sap on raw-rubbed hands and the stream fresh braiding

The rocks with the sweet weedy smell suffusing you.

Why did we break in two, such a jagged fissure,

So many nights the pain of it throbbing against the atramentous quilt

The passage of time like a coarse-toothed rasp against the wound—

The gift of forbearance: the cicatriceal longing.

Lay us down together now—we still fit.