1

Wake from a dream of you climbing
For hours out of a vast lake at night,
The lake a fissure in a dark landscape,
Distant mountains drunk with cloudlight,
Bare sometimes like a cracked scalp.
By some stagecraft the lake illumines
Of itself like an organ of light,
Out of which your pale body rises
Without witness, to some other index
Of temporality—astral or geological—you rise,
As the stars excavate the vaulted dark,
As if a chainsaw of the cosmos
Had rent a cataclysm for you to fill.
The vast waters are innocent of you
But the night is not, starkiller.

Holding to the curtain I survey the world,
Drizzle coming off the trees in braids.
The world is falling from your hair.