After plumping the pillows, settling the bedcovers,
lingering for a moment’s
final, fluent
embrace,
our bodies fall asleep,
each sinking into the sculptural
shape of itself
which years of sleeping have molded
into the mattress,
and my body,
whether rolling over and over in the tidal pull of the moon
or lying still as the dead,
is drawn
into the cascade and slippage we call dream—
how can I refuse
to be a quickwater of stars, a celestial eddy,
a black hole
from which I emerge,
carried along
on raft or dinghy or just dangling there, a plum bob
in the boundless space
we call little death
or at times, more simply,
downfall?
Just last night, I watched what I thought was
my body
wrapped entirely in a mesh of silverish metal threads
as it fell through empty
outer space,
so that I resembled,
I thought on waking, a thimble—
but before
waking, my body simply fell and fell, and it fell
so fast
there was no whisper of a word
for the meteor I wasn’t—
I was falling
back into the earth’s pull of gravity,
back into the body
I know and love for its reliable
portions of pleasure and pain,
its durable
wisdoms, its life-tides
and inner rivers, its coastlines and awkward
pelicans, falling
deeper into meadows and their more intimate
burrows,
all the while, overhead
those passerine
multitudes who soar and dip in the light as words will do
as they migrate back to us
with the dawn,
returning as layers of birdsong.
The sky grows lighter still.
Wind shifts, the woods open. Our bodies
reach for each other
once again. Welcome back,
I sigh, waking up in the human universe of the body. Welcome home.