Not having found your way out of the woods, begin
Looking for somewhere to bed at nightfall
Though you have nothing
But part of yourself to lie on, nothing but skin and backbone
And the bare ungiving ground to reconcile.
From standing to kneeling,
From crouching to turning over all leaves, to going under,
You must help yourself like any animal
To enter the charmed circle
Of the night with a body not meant for stretching or sprawling:
One earflap at a time knuckling your skull,
Your stiff neck (needing
An owl’s twist to stay even) cross-purposing your spine,
With rigid ankles, with nowhere to put your arms.
But now, lying still
At last, you may watch the shadows seeking their own level,
The ground beneath you neither rising nor falling,
Neither giving or taking
From the dissolving cadence of your heart, identical darkness
Behind and before your eyes—and you are going
To sleep without a ceiling,
For the first time without walls, not falling asleep, not losing
Anything under you to the imponderable
Dead and living
Earth, your countervailing bed, but settling down
Beside it across the slackening threshold
Of the place where it is always
Light, at the beginning of dreams, where the stars, shut out
By leaves and branches in another forest, burn
At the mattering source
Forever, though a dream may have it’s snout half sunk in blood
And the mind’s tooth gnaw all night at bone and tendon
Among the trembling snares:
Whoever stumbles across you in the dark may borrow
Your hidebound substance for the encouragement
Of mites or angels;
But whatever they can't keep is yours for the asking. Turn up
In time, at the first faint stretch of dawn, and you'll see
A world, pale-green as hazel,
The chalk-green convolute lichen by your hand like sea fog,
The fallen tree beside you in half-light
Dreaming a greener sapling,
The dead twigs turning over, and your cupped hand lying open
Beyond you in the morning like a flower.
Making light of it,
You have forgotten why you came, have served your purpose, and simply
By being here have found the right way out.
Now, you may waken.