When I altared my wife, I was youth.

We burned into two arcs of light,

then cooled back into man and woman.

Sleep was a return—already my dreams had

lived many years longer than my body.

How to account for what transpired

in the black cities of my oldest age?

When I was youth, I thought fact was

the basis of reality. But now I know

I am earth turning on an axis of mythology.

I read transcripts of my dreams each morning

in the lines beneath my eyes, my fingers

sounding out the consonants and vowels

written in a braille of pocks and pores,

trying to discern what my body knows

about the future but hasn’t yet told me.

It hums the oms of dark matter,

the un-logic of image and word becoming

a pulse in my thigh. Let me lie down again

with the wife of my youth and exalt the dark

with our burning, before I close my eyes

and slip into the night of my longest life.