When I woke the darkness was so thick,
So palpable and black that my eyes
Seemed blind as stone staring into stone.

The blade that I had dreamed, efficient and quick
As it cut into my thigh, cleaning a gangrened
Wound infected to the bone, seemed poised

Above my throat: Close-grained, impenetrable,
The blackness rose before me like a wall.
And then off in the next room, nervous, light,

A soft padding as of an animal
Raced like my heartbeat in my temples
Round and round, trapped, stealthily desperate

As if hunting its own track, terrified
And captivated by its own odor.
Skin cool in the night air, eyes drilling

Through the dark, who I was before I
Slept had burned off like a vapor
So that amnesiac and pure, witnessing

My terror that I no longer recognized
As my own, my mind floated beyond me
To confront that frantic, closing footfall

As Jacob dreaming met his dark angel—
Though in my wrestling nothing blessed me
Or promised any blessing; but was a mask whose eyes

Were all black pupil, blind as molten tar.
I strained to see what paced there, my eyes burning
Through the dark until a pair of eyes blazed

Back across the blackness, an insistent, glazed
Staring that shimmered and disappeared.
The shining blade plunged at my throat, my mind

Stretched and twisted, its wires tightening
And turning as the creature lunged back and forth
And with a deep-throated yowling, thrashing

And thrashing to fight clear of its own circling,
Cleanly leapt away. I reached for the knife
But gripped only air, my eyes pressing

Deeper and deeper into the night's black stone,
Cutting the way the knife had cut into my wound,
Probing for the white shining of the bone:

What had I become? What darkness had my dream
Led me down into? Too frightened even
To move, I lay bound and sweating in

The sheets, the moon a warning-bell beating
On the glass, its light carving out the curtains
Like the shadow of a wing across the windowpane.