The Real Night
        The real night! Hasn't yet begun to fall.
                        Vasko Popa

I enter the sleep of childhood, the dark
filled with dense instructive matter when skeletons

                        rain down to enlighten me. Barefoot
                        in my embroidered chemise, I flit from window

to window, slam each casement on ileum
and femur to hinder my further guidance. Supine

                        under the crisp duvet, each dream's a telegram
                        from the limbic brain that directs me to practice

darkness with the owl, pick through the skeletal remains,
check for all thirty-two teeth and remember

                        to avoid the buried life of night which falls fast
                        in these latitudes and in my bed where

I'm unlikely to find a milder horror,
a safer form of the verb to be.

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Copyright © 2019 Wendy Taylor Carlisle All rights reserved
from The Mercy of Traffic
Unlikely Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission