Poem of the day
This is the first poem of Jaime Saenz's The Night, which is a very strange book of poetry.
The night, its feelers twitching in the distance
the night locked into a box swallowed by the night in the
dresser in the nook
while my eyes and especially that space between my eyes
and nostrils stretches out like a two-story gutter
startled and unnerved, I'm suddenly aware--there's a
tubular cocoon, spun from eye to eye, through which I see
only the night, fractured and phantasmagoric
thanks to a force from who knows where the space of my
dream has been split by a wall
on this side sleep is not possible and on the other it's
perfectly possible but nevertheless thoroughly impossible
the wall, in fact, is not a wall but a living force that writhes
and throbs and this wall is me
with an inconceivable transparency that allows me to see
the night's other side
and places you might sleep in an overcoat of aches and
interminable sighs and grief-belching terrors which home in
on your bones
the other side of night is a night without night, without
earth, without shelter, without rooms, without furniture,
unpeopled
there is absolutely nothing on the other side of the night
it's a world utterly without world, and to possess it, you
must never arrive there
--it's the dock at the very side of your body
and, at the same time, it's inconceivably remote.