Shame
I go the way that Providence dictates,
with the assurance of a sleepwalker.
And sleep replied, if you want me,
I will be in the light of the freezer
with a fifth of scotch and a revolver.
Which is when he resolved to take
a season in the Alps, close his eyes
to watch the clouds drift in flocks across
the snow to slaughter. But the problem
was always elsewhere, in a neighbor,
across the border, the monument pulled down,
far below the crest of the elevator
shaft whose monolith rises through
its mountain obstacle, undetected.
Doubtless he came to convalesce,
to breathe the acetylene air, braced
by morning’s needle full of vitamins
and meth, to pose for the camera,
hand extended, the girl so small she fit
in his shadow like a foot in a shoe.
I have read those who cannot sleep
never wake. Still they walk, they pose,
they spread a map of the big picture
littered with toy garrisons and tanks.
The somnambulist knows what it is to fall.
Ask the survivor who rolls out of bed
onto the carpet, or the man who walks
through a window on the third floor.
What is it they hope to leave behind.
A little of everything, a lot of nothing.
In each a wound closes. Eyelids rise.
I too love the encomia to blindness,
the part where a sleepwalker’s heart
circles back and slaps a hole in flesh
like a ball in a mitt. I feel it pound.
But pretense of assurance is a sign
of a deeper hole, a drain in a room
where visions go and return as symptoms.
Walking blind is no intrepid wonder.
It is the accident on a stretch of road
ahead, its red beacon cloaked in fog.
Tell me. What does any tyrant know.
As a sacred vessel, he would be pure
armor without face and therefore god.
The self-proclaimed providential who
sleepwalks to the portico understands
precious little of his path, how it ends,
what angel guides him with its heart in cinders.
What exhumed spirit of displacement
and dread rises, walks, opens the gate,
scans the jagged crystal of the peaks,
the glacier, the cold fire of the moon.
How bright the glass where ice meets dark.
Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-six books including, most recently, The Dove of the Morning News (Test Site Poetry Award, University of Nevada Press, 2024),Lunette (Wishing Jewel Editor’s Selection, Green Linden, 2024), Vault (Richard Snyder Award, Ashland, 2023), Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023), Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner Press, 2022), Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), and Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, 2021), plus two books of criticism, Immanent Distance (U. of Michigan, 2015) and Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019).
