Three a.m., the house a foreign country I wake in,
same language but a different inflection,
a creak on the stair a harbinger,
this jolt into insomnia an alert.

In an etching by Goya, demons perch on a bedpost
and clamor for the sleeper's heart.

Long ago we knelt for prayers
but those children have slept for years,
dreams merging child into beast.
Somewhere
a truck explodes and bodies bloom
with the fleshy extravagance of peonies-
forgive me,
not petals but a scream settling on entrails,
bone, meat, our betrayals piling in gutters.

It should be obvious where the fault lies,
yet we continue to build there, the structure
collapsing into itself, the century in ruins.
Somewhere
a trail remains, linking our inlands,
the path to summers in the mountains
where a halo of hummingbirds
crowns the feeder,
rock hectored by a snow-fed river,
mist from the falls beading our hair.

Moving as we do from the body
and its parochial demands to lessons of love,
you might say we succeed as often as not,
on call even as we sleep.
Even as we sleep,
the cry of a puma cracks the night.