The Hypnopomp

She enters on yellow

ballet slippers, toes kissing

vinyl planks, breathes into my

mouth to untuck

the corner of the stories

I wrote in the night

without knowing.

.

Sealed envelopes, my eyelids,

fading ink, in kindness she

redacts only the words that spill

through the sieve of morning,

a tithe into her satin lap,

my mind to claim another day,

a mind inside this body.

.

Inside this body, clutching

fragments of what I learned

of me, sifting through bits

dropped by a rolling tide.

When she goes, I know

she’ll take something—something!—

I’ll spend the whole day missing.

.

For now

she floats me,

a transparent cloud

of gnosis. Some emotion

(is it longing?)

dissolves

at the edge of day’s forgetting.