1. Irruption— The silent flutter of feathers Crashes through the safety of the cotton comforter. I lie, motionless, enthralled. It perches above me, my chest a tree branch, gazing deep, diamantine galactic black eyes. Paralysis comes in waves, it becomes crepuscular. Anne Sexton’s words move like pantomime in my mind: “Death was simpler than I thought.” And it spoke to me, like a saturnine angel of light. I think I hear its nonexistent tongue, an otherworldly, celestial dialect. In a flash, it transcends, ascends. Once again, I’m alone in the cold silver of daybreak. 2. Somnambulism— I awake in unfamiliar places: The backyard, grass covered in the opals of last night’s unwonted rainstorm in California. A sublime, star-lined, snow-capped mountain zenith. The desire for inertia is excruciating and endless. Have I lost time or am I lost to it? Amongst others, who seem so in control, I yearn to ask: “Did you too see them, drifting, all night, on the black river?” But no words come out, only silent motion, empty prayers. Only being raptured again back to sleep. 3. Optophobia— A refuge found in shades of ink-light space, groping through the yucca and salvia, surreptitious screeches and beak snaps, a cacophony, guiding me, an involuntary augur seeking sightlessly. How I long to see through their old energy eyes. Dreams become how I descry where they burrow, nest, brood, preen, deeper and deeper into me. Through the eyes I see only light and shadows; through my mind: moons and stars and owls. 4. Awakening— Days are now tundric, midnight sun illuminating their hollows on the slight, windswept rises. Searching for the white owls in their depressions, needing to nestle beside them, to molt each hair, fiber, memory, And to soar, into the cosmic realms from which I, you, came.