The Eden of the Author of Sleep

for Jean

And sleep to grief as air is to the rain,

upon waking, no explanation, just blue

spoons of the eucalyptus measuring

and pouring torrents. A kind of winter.

As if what is real had been buried

and all sure surfaces blurred. Is it me

or the world, risen from beneath?

Mind refining ruin, or an outside

unseen hand, working—as if with

a small brush, for clarity—the details?

To open my eyes is the shape of a city

rising slowly through sand. Cloudy

quartz, my throat, cut unadorned

from the quarry, stone of city cemetery

and roads, to breathe is a mausoleum

breached. To think of Eden is speech

to fill a grave, tree in which knowledge

augurs only its limits, the word snake

a thought crawling in the shadow

of its body. Was it, Adam, like this

always, intellect in the mind’s small sty

miming confinement for meaning, sleep

to grief as air is to the rain, upon waking,

the world’s own weapons turned against it—

Copyright Credit: Brian Teare, “The Eden of the Author of Sleep” from Ploughshares (Winter 2002-2003) and forthcoming in 2010 in Pleasure (Ahsahta Press). Copyright © 2002 by Brian Teare.

Source: Ploughshares (2002)