No Shelter

Waking in the night, some long-outgrown instinct
turns my eyes to the doorway, the dark there somehow unexpected
shutting in as I sleep. My mouth opens
in the shape of names that fail before sound
can fill them: Mother, Father, God –

Those doors are long dark. I can see,
without need of flashlight or lamp, the familiar
sillouettes of my own furniture, just as they are –
no sound, no shadow, nothing terrible
or unaccounted-for. Whatever way I turn
there is only the known, bounded dark
I have made my own these twenty-seven years.

In sleep I cried out, in sleep looked to the corridor
down which help might have come,
arms to soothe and shelter, but that is all
long-ago and far-away, when hunched figures menaced
from laundry hampers, the creaks and complaints
of a house settling on its foundations. That terror ended
at dawn.

Twenty years later, I wake and feel the familiar lurch
in the pit of my stomach, the frantic twisting – towards what?
Here in my own room where there is no danger, no change
to start me awake, I am falling, anyway,
beyond nightmares, beyond crying-out,
beyond these known walls, this bed, this ground
undistorted by the pressure of this private terror
against which nothing can hold.

Rocked in the shelter of my own two arms, I break
and break against nothing.