George David Clark

REVEILLE WITH ITS OWN EYES CLOSED

Two angels in the live oak's highest boughs are sleeping,
constructing delicately a crystalline fretwork,

this lattice of music, the inscrutable dreams of angels
in the holy factories of their minds. One conceives

a rope of braided sand, a mansion made entirely of water:
what will never exist. The other dreams faintly of God,

whom she has perhaps met only once, and then, simply
as a cavity in her manifold and labyrinth consciousness.

Dawn comes, and like reflections on the rain-broke surface
of a pond the angels dissolve beyond a curtain of brilliance,

the wake their Lord casts moving between one state
and another. Rising now, from what we might foolishly

call a slumber, but is in fact a kind of focused prayer
unto Himself, He forgets them, or better, sacrifices them

to the shade of His lesser attentions. What He remembers,
what He continues, carefully, to imagine, projecting it now

through these curtains dappled by sun and leaf-shadow,
into this very bedroom, is the instant of your waking,

Sleeper, the moment when even before you move
I sense your body quickening beneath the sheets

as if something believed in you and named you with light.

George David Clark's poems can be found reprinted elsewhere online at Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. He teaches creative writing and literature as a Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso University and is the editor of 32 Poems. "Reveille With Its Own Eyes Closed" first appeared in Salt Hill.