The Wound

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.

Copyright Credit: Tom Sleigh, "The Wound" from Waking, published by The University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 1990 by Tom Sleigh. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: Waking (The University of Chicago Press, 1990)