Slept, Jennifer Chang

Slept

The thorns had hands. The fire stood still.
It will take a hundred years

to piece together a hundred dreams.
A room of ashes was a room out-spun.

Mother says the heart is a wheel

and it will turn as I turn. Quickly.
Nightly. I married the owl.

I told her I could not walk,

the walls circled my steps. I told her,
my flesh became stone and I did not

bleed blood, but sound.
What sound? I could not describe it;

it was voiceless

and low. But it was not.
Mostly I was not alone in my solitude.

My breath became the ghost of me,

or the ghost of an old man
I’d long forgotten,
a midnight grandfather.

Pages of thoughts, they were not mine,
though my hand mastered

their language. I told her,

I cannot howl winsomely
like vixens.
Like thieves. I wandered the forest,

fingering every loose twig,
but I was sleeping. My hand,

good as air, was sleeping.

In my sleep, I wrote the field guide:
red-winged dream, tufted dream.

One was of salt,

one without hunger—a forest

of three-leaved trees.
I thought I knew everything.

My bed sat alone amongst the sassafras.
A fox, mid-pace and mid-bark, stopped

statue-like on a patch of moss.

I was watcher,

or maker. Yellow-bellied
dream, mourning dream.

Each thing I saw: a seed to myself.

Inside a girl stirred restless as rain.
I could not see her. I only grew.

Mother says when the basket’s full,
it is time to come home.

Asleep, I lived

in silence, but in light.

What if waking were a room
black as the mind? Horn-billed dream,

Stellar’s dream. And the body,

a darkness there is no memory of.