Voices
       

Odd that since I was a boy, I've never felt the presence
of the dark until now, its sheer,
massive walls towering above me as though I've fallen

into a crevasse. What time is it?
From the hall, through a closed door, voices of nurses grow

louder then fade, becoming a murmur

like the murmur one hears in a breeze stirring sycamores
and roughening the surface
of a lake, in a stream of freeway traffic,

in waves breaking, the tide going out. Will it leave me?
It's quiet here. I dreamt

you were on a screened-in porch of a cabin talking
with your sister,
laughing sometimes, fireflies outside. I listened. Listening

was enough. In this dark, this quiet, I drift

from myself as though I'm
in the back row of an empty lecture hall, my body
on a table down in front—the subject

of a talk I slept through. What was said?
Weren't you there? I dangle my hand alongside the bed

as if dangling it in surf
washing up the beach. Will the water reach me,
the voices return?

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Copyright © 2022 Brian Satrom All rights reserved
from Starting Again
FinishingLine Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission