Heart of Night

“In sleep we lie all naked and alone, in sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.”

                                                                       — Thomas Wolfe

Sleepless Heart

At first it is a kneading, a small animal, worried,
wanting out. You wake, palm to chest.

Bright fog beyond the windows,
and you recognize the moonlit interior, the gouged
and pockmarked stone, its quiet rhythm
through wet haze, caught, reflecting
some other beauty.

You remember being told: The cells of the heart know only
how to be a heart. It was a long time ago.
Now your body is a clutch of moss
grown around that knot of cells rioting,
that clump of red electricity
you hold but can’t touch.

The moon, sinking, separates
shadows from mere blackness, drains
over the body of your calico stretched in sleep,
paws twitching, some dream of a chase,
then pummeling, suckling, a sigh, surrender.

It isn’t darkness that you lie in

between night and morning.

Palm to chest, eyes shut, you try to go back,

to go in. The cells of the heart pulsed

before you could call them a heart, in the days

when you could have grown a tail, mitts for hands,

thumb of a head, dark purple panes of alien eyes,

that nub of brain aware of nothing.