Who lay down at evening
and woke at night
a stranger to himself? A country
wholly unfound to himself, who wondered
behind closed eyes
if his fate meant winter knitting
outcome underground, summer
overdue, or spring’s pure parable, the turning
in every turning thing, fruit and flower,
jar, spindle, and story?
He’s the one who heard
the hidden dove’s troubled voice
and has been asking
ever since: Whose sleep
builds and unbuilds those great rooms, Night and Day?
He’s the one who knows
what a gleaned thing his own voice is,
something the birds
discarded, trading for a future. Call him
one whom night found beyond
the fallen gate,
where the mower never mows,
with no way to go but toward
the growing shadow of the earth.
Call him the call embarked
in search of itself, a black dew receding
unto its own beginnings.
Depending on who you ask,
his mother or his night, he’s either
the offspring of his childhood or his death.
Depending on who his mother is in his dreams —
beggar, thief, boatman, mist —
he’s either a man paused
on the stairs, thinking he heard
the names he used as a boy
behind his parents’ house,
during evening games of lost and found,
or else a child
reading out loud to himself
from his favorite book every morning.
One day, he finds his own voice
strange, himself no longer
the names his playmates knew him by,
but not yet the boundless
quiet of his mother’s watching
from another room.