Night Myths

Sleepless with fever, 
under one small lamp you stared 
at a cherry wood cabinet, dark whorls 
spiraled like galaxies and polished 
to hold any light. 
What your eyes saw and what they imagined
became equal in that space, circled 
in immense night by the lamp’s halo. 

In the six-foot span of wood 
you found no seams or scars, 
though surely they were there, 
part of elf faces and falling streams, 
cliffs shaggy with moss. 
It didn’t matter whether visions 
came from fever or from some code 
tapped in the wood grain— 
they floated you through wilderness droughts
of childhood, where lodgepole and aspen 
grew thinly upon slopes; 
near forest flowers 
that bloom for one day only, 
whose pale names you could not recall. 
They rose even from the patchwork: 
Grandmother’s scraps seamed 
into oak leaves—calico cotton.

You know about conceits, the ego 
seeing itself linked 
with plants. So those nights 
as you moved into wood after wood
you repeated words like ritual: 
Arms are not limbs, emptied. 
Blood is not sap 
relearning the climb. Fallen trees 
leave no bones 
dissolving into forest floors. 
You are only an ill mind straining at blackness
under a small, incandescent light.