St. Louis Ghazal
The Sleeper
The Vernacular
for Don
Only at evening’s threshold—night’s black gall as yet to fall—
Does he go down to the River des Peres:
The concrete channel dry, windswept,
A hint of snow on the air.
First he forgets which key goes in the lock,
Then which house is his. Then he claims he doesn’t care.
Next to a trashcan fire, he mumbles to himself
And God—where is God—detained somewhere?
The culvert dry, windswept. A hint of snow on the air.
Where else to find God but at the banks of the River Despair.
At night, her heart, a barn owl,
Departs without a sound,
Wears a mask of gouged-out wood
Made moon-bright with gesso,
Hunts near where ferns drape a spring.
At night, her hands undo the needlework,
Rewind thread upon the spool,
Take each square of the quilt
And re-piece the scrapes
Into the vague shape of previous lives:
Summer dresses, aprons, napkins. . .
Her belly, as soft as purple clover,
Lifts and settles with each breath.
Her breasts are waxy in November light.
Sometimes her daughter is an infant
Again and someone, intending malice
Or not, has taken the child away,
Or she touches her belly and the child
Is not yet born, at home in her womb.
In the limitless realm of dreams,
Words come to her lips and she speaks them.
Night like a gray velvet dust covers
Everything, even the murmured words,
And sound resonates in the room
Like a note within a cello’s hollow body.
The strangeness of beauty:
A raw clay scar where an oak uprooted.
Or a fiery knot of snakes coupling.
Or power lines slung with ice.
Your sister, for instance, at sunset—
Backlit, silhouetted—waving away the camera.
A coincidence of light fixed on film:
Not the moment before, not the moment after.
Eric Pankey is the author of ten collections of poetry. A new book, Crow-Work is due from Milkweed Editions in early 2015. He teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at George Mason University, where he is Heritage Chair in Writing.
