In the Galaxy of Sleep

 
 
 
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.
 
 
 

Cameron Alexander Lawrence's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch, TYPO, Forklift, Ohio; Whiskey Island, Image, Asheville Poetry Review, and elsewhere. A native Arizonan, Cameron now lives in Decatur, GA, with his wife and four children.