Mesmer's Insomnia
 
In our afternoon sessions, lockets of magnetic light blur
the spines of firs in the private holiday of her induced sleep;

childish, her eyes widen, devoted to a glair
of inward, fabled knowledge I choreograph, and keep

secret. At night, in the desolate hair shirt
of her absence, I own the lodestone of her wild weeping:

it bespeaks the potent silence of her cloistered tongue--
a zone I cannot enter but whose passion I reap,

lured like nocturnal geese honing off over the Danube, restlessly
obedient to laws chauvinistic and infidel--and deepening.