|
| One day in that room, a small rat. |
| Two days later, a snake. |
| Who, seeing me enter, |
| whipped the long stripe of his |
| body under the bed, |
| then curled like a docile house-pet. |
| I don't know how either came or left. |
| Later, the flashlight found nothing. |
| For a year I watched |
| as something -- terror? happiness? grief? -- |
| entered and then left my body. |
| Not knowing how it came in, |
| Not knowing how it went out. |
| It hung where words could not reach it. |
| It slept where light could not go. |
| Its scent was neither snake nor rat, |
| neither sensualist nor ascetic. |
| There are openings in our lives |
| of which we know nothing. |
| Through them |
| the belled herds travel at will, |
| long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust. |
