There are many ways to sleep that are not
restful. There are lakes that are open
or closed in different seasons as though
by some kind of door.
Tonight the eels migrate:
they know where they are going:
they have been there once before.
They are like sound particles traveling
outward from a single source, acquiring
the behavior of the space they
interact with, now returning less loudly
back to the place they came from
in order that they may be heard. I turn the lock
against the eels, scatter salt:
my house is not a sea.
One could sleep all night through
the migration, a sharp instrument
in one’s hand, as if a dream were a way
to measure the angle between two objects:
one real, and one wriggling, slow
but urgent, across the frost and asphalt,
making an undecipherable sound.
