The Sleeping Wall

Jane M. Downs
Run to the field. Taste the dew. A snake parts the grass. Its cool body grazes your leg.
A gust sweeps through Saint Anne’s. Lilac air. Noon sun. She sweats beneath her dress.
James holds her elbow, her weight against his arm. Michael’s hand in hers.
The sun rises even if you want the night to last. You lift your face to warmth even as you crave the
dark. You sleep. You rise, your dreams like tissue dissolving.
They turn to leave. Church bells call for mid-day prayer. Sound carves shapes out of fields.
Sound, a membrane tight around her head. Charms, dumb at her wrist.
9
He understands the spell is broken. Black crow glistening at the grave. Tree branches
knuckled with buds. Tips of flowers thrust upward in search of light.
The soldier in Saigon without hands, the corpse on Ho Chi Minh Trail. Now, he is one
of them.
Medina in the rocker. Michael on the dock, the dog in his arms. James puts his hands on
her shoulders. His touch crosses her flesh into ice.
Spring unfurls itself, an assault. Birch drip with seeds. No one sleeps. The loons return,
their cries like sobs. No one speaks of her carelessness. Of Mai. Waves slap the dock.
Perhaps, he can only love what he holds in his mind—voices of the past in endless argument,
searching for resolutions that elude them. Each day he falls further away from hope,
from the fable of redemption.
Their sons had raced around her. She’d held up her wrists to show him her bracelets.
10
Gin in a glass. He plays Moonlight Sonata. He is a boy beside his teacher, inhaling her perfume.
His mother at home washing his sisters’ dresses. Soft clattering of dishes. The slow
sounds of horses in the field.
She dreams she rises like a spirit above the bed. Something unformed, without sensation, con-
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