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