TOM SLEIGH

After Midnight


After midnight in the summer heat,
the black river of the road flowing out and out,
windows rolled down, tires buoyant as water,

the car floats through the night gone still forever
around the hospital on the hill,
the neon of the ER turning the waiting eyes to glass.

Mist rises from the river,
the moon nowhere in sight,
only thick-leaved trees sweeping the cool black.

Secret in her power, like a sunroof
sliding open to the air, Athena touches you
and makes you, to yourself, younger, stronger

--vital as the river where rats
along the bank breed in the sweet grass
infusing the heavy air,

the radio tower
above the quiet city beaming
from its lone eye a voice sobsinging,

"Spring can really hang you up the most" . . . disenchanted
siren who sings you back into yourself
warily hoarding the charmed strength

of your middle age, your eyes not on the stars
but on a shadow under the trees
like Cyclops in his cave

praying to Poseidon to deliver you
to destruction even as you boast, "My name
is No Man, No Man is my famous name--"

the car hurtling weightless through the open night.




The Dreamhouse


Does it move inside him, that trembling of the earth?
Or is it his spirit failing him, teetering and wobbling,
Its gyroscopic spin slowing to a swoon?

And when he mumbles of seven falls descending one into the next,
Is he the one stumbling up the spray-slick wooden steps,
Or is it he himself the slowly diffusing spray?

That permeable ocean between him and his death
Overflows the window and lifts him above the waves,
His drenched sheets and his hands limp in his lap

Poised eternally, a bubble about to breakÉ
And then the air thickens, weighing down his flesh,
The earth's trembling now too ghostly for him to feel,

The seven falls mere water pouring pool to pool,
His still body afloat in the ether of morphine
Expunged by the glare flooding across the paneÉ

His being, like absence new-minted in the clouds,
Scatters in gusts and squalls. Sheets stripped, his vacant bed
Hovers in the room while moonlight, sunlight

Scrub the walls clean--his closets now emptied,
His clothes dispersed, his face, his eyes doing
A slow dissolve in memory's salt baths

Even as he takes up residence, the dreamhouse
A void all glass and air: one table, one chair,
And sweeping wall to wall to wall sunlight everywhere.


Both poems are forthcoming in The Dreamhouse(University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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