Asleep you wake

April 22, 1981

Sleeping you wake narrow, barely enough to hear birds chipping chipping at monolith dark, that stone blinding your view of manifold space -- that single block, a monument slab pressing you back to inner country of dream winds and wan remembrance, cold curfew, bleak hearth -- while vision cries for traits, marks, particulars: warped bough, burdened stem, pocked bench, rusted hub, the bonds of day, precise day, day undoing that liberal blur of dense night, that opaque music chiseled silent by dawn . . . while ear listens open for wheel-clack, faucet-plash, hoe-chop: terse unobstructed acts of light toward which willingly bound you rise with widening eyes.