Such Insomnia and the Shape

it takes in the dark. Moon with a faint

dent. Clouds squishing like grubs. The minerals

awake in their sightless caves.

Indifferent. Loveless.

Wulfenite, azurite, hematite,

sulfur. What I must do

is breathe and think of breathing

things, orchids and insects, the soft

exhalations of cedars on the cliff’s

edge. Or Röntgen’s first images of X-rays

on photographic plates:

fragile skeletons of frog and fish,

the left hand of his wife,

her tapered bones within their cloud

of shadowy flesh. The beginning

of seeing past sight—

in which what’s interior becomes

visible architecture for the living self.

I love the thought of slipping

into a darkness which is actually

the beginning of a different kind of light.

But how to know which darkening

is just a dreaming spinning out

the cocoon it will soon sail away from?

No one to turn the lights on,

to say this grotto’s simply full of dust

and brush away the shattered pollens.