It isn’t the hush of thunderous thoughts or
billowing misdeeds, or the lull of the
waves, the calm of the sea. Or knowing that it

will be there every evening when the day has drawn
its last breath, and you roll your stockings off
to give yourself to it.  It’s not the swallow or how you

make it up, or that it puts you to sleep, or the placing
your demons in the deep freeze. If just for that moment
when you no longer think, when the dark turns light
and the devil wears white –

in that instance when you’re back as a seed
before it all began –
a figment in your father’s imagination
it’s then