The Sleep

Summary

“I am so happy.”

—The final, death-bed words of G. M. H.

It is an answer, a going-into.

The soft helmet slowly eases over the head.

The limbs begin to believe in their gravity,

The dark age of faith begins, a god below

Draws down the body, he wants it

And we are flattered.

We are going to the level of water.

(Don't hold on. Drop fair, drop fair.)

This is a fine seepage, we think,

Seepage ravelling to a river

To set ourselves upon. So

What is the price of dark water?

Where is the weight going?

The body powers the vaguest of shapes,

Pilot-boat, the falls collapse

And collapse upon themselves. We hear them

In time and imitate them.

We would turn to water that has lost

Its floor, water surprisingly

In space and beading,

A glittering disintegration.

Now, what was a bed

Rocks just perceptibly, this is a cradle

In search of a captain, the bone-cargo

Settles, the medium

Washes up over and across and fills

The spaces we have been keeping empty just for this,

The palpable black herein

Barbarian, riding us down.

There will be a level

We come to, will we know it?

A flat place with, look, a light.

It is a guess as our loins give way.

Already we are forgetting

Where we were

And left from, the human

Faces like sunglare hurting our eyes.

Did we even say goodbye? Yet could there

Possibly be someone here now,

That this going down

Not be so sole, and sore,

A cup, a cupped hand, a basket,

These forms of containment

Forms of Person

Where, when we're water, we're caught?

Listen. It is the sound of ourselves,

This passage: a breath.

We are almost not here.

If we break up this softly,

We must be incomparably lovely.