Dear Thanatos,

Goddamn the sweet ease of night.
Damn the daylight, too. Dream me.

Winter me. Sleep me somewhere numb.
Somewhere God doesn't summon me

from the side of a man who begs me to dive
the well and bring up the boat. I ate the liver

of a seal and a narwhal's arctic tongue. I shot
a humpback with a harpoon. It struggled,

but it sang the moral mysteries, moan
edits oral history to the submarines as it fell,

its body a hundred-year feast for the ocean floor,
the testament in its belly gone so wild,

so racked with doubt, not all the fat on
the whale's back could burn the meaning out.



From Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.