To Sleep

Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand

that stroked my brow: “Come along, child;

stretch out your feet under the blanket.

Darkness will give you back, unremembering.

Do not be afraid.” So I put down my book

and pushed like a finger through sheer silk,

the autobiographical part of me, the am,

snatched up to a different place, where I was

no longer my body but something more—

the compulsive, disorderly parts of me

in a state of equalization, everything sliding off:

war, suicide, love, poverty—as the rebellious,

mortal I, I, I lay, like a beetle irrigating a rose,

my red thoughts in a red shade all I was.