Black Dot Diary

Sleep­walk­ing with the Animals

The first word is no.
You learn it with your eyes closed.
It takes you back through time — remember

how your path was learned
as pos­si­bil­i­ties were eliminated.

But before this, you are a child,
tuned to the hum­ming orbits of plan­ets,
to Ursa Major bel­low­ing its light
through the galaxy,
and Earthly sounds of bears and wolves,
their eyes glit­ter­ing like con­stel­la­tions,
mag­ni­fied and tempt­ing
on humid sum­mer nights.

You are a child, slip­ping out your win­dow,
padding across damp moss, through fire­weed
and sway­ing trees

to walk with the ani­mals
in woods around your home,
the perime­ters of your par­ents’ sleep,
no words to quell the sound of stars.

But the first word is no.
You are a sleep­walker, the doc­tor says,
so your dreams are mon­i­tored, win­dows bolted,
your nights filled with talk and sense,

an alarm that rings
when you open the doors.

Soon, the sky is dis­tant,
con­stel­la­tions abstract and silent.
You enter the for­est only by daylight,

and even the ani­mals reject you,
smelling what you are—
the sweet, timid odour
of tame.

© 2001 Kerry Slavens, pub­lished in the chap­book Stranger Under the Stars, The Hawthorne Series, Vic­to­ria, BC

Stranger Under the Stars

You can’t see the stars from the city, he said,
so he herded my best friend and me
into the back seat
of his white convertible,

and we raced the moon
into rural obliv­ion,
as the road’s dot­ted lines ran together
like a long stream of milk.
I still say that being in that car
was like rid­ing in the belly of a dove.

We searched for shin­ing eyes of ani­mals
in the blur­ring trees by the road­side,
but the woods were dead empty.
The only liv­ing things in the uni­verse
seemed to be the three of us and the stars,

and he was the stranger among us
who said he’d stud­ied astron­omy in prison
where he never saw the stars.

Night is what I live for, he said.
Moon­light bounced off his knuck­les
as he told us about time travel, quasars
and mys­te­ri­ous black holes.

My friend said later he could have killed us
and buried our bod­ies in the dark woods,
but I stopped her right there and said,
That would have been petty.

© 2001 Kerry Slavens, pub­lished in the chap­book Stranger Under the Stars, The Hawthorne Series, Vic­to­ria, BC

My Heroes Speak in Tongues

Their words slip through my hands,
cold stones from wells
or rosary beads unstrung.

I lie with my heroes in the night,
learn the secrets of their sleep­less­ness,
these voices from angels
mur­mur­ing against my belly,
sopra­nos of gods com­ing to me
through the dark, these obscene
phone calls from heaven. I am healed.

Halle­jul­lah, the night is com­ing down
and my heroes are speak­ing in tongues,
some­times forked, some­times flick­er­ing
like flash fire through the dark.

Through the sheets
their words offer up prayers.
My heroes and I, tan­gled in linen rid­dles,
grap­ple with the mean­ing of life and love
with the night’s mouth shout­ing O,
its lips rough and ready,
tongue lick­ing slowly at the sky,
like one of my heroes talk­ing back­wards,
mov­ing against my thighs.

© 1987 Kerry Slavens, pub­lished in Grav­ity and Light, co-​authored with Mar­garet Black­wood and Anne. M. Kelly, Cacananaadada Press (Rons­dale Press), 2001