When they had grown old I opened the door
to their bedroom and found my parents
rolling over, lost in dreams. They slept
the way my daughter once slept
in the hot, still months after she was born:
eyelids fluttering,
tucked beneath a sheet, a single hand or foot
exposed; they slept while
fishermen cast nets into the deep
blue leagues of the sea, slept
while our island’s sand dunes
eased themselves over golf courses
and abandoned hotels: the past
suffocated by a glittering hush. Watching
them sleep
was like watching Pelicans unfold
in the sky. They slept while deer ate
their garden and the mailbox overflowed
with white envelopes, slept like
characters in Sleeping Beauty,
behind a rising forest of briars
and vines, slept while their sailboat
took on water and their dock slithered
with sunbathing snakes, slept between
breakfast and lunch, and again between lunch
and dinner, slept while their bloodhound
ran, howling, through the streets, slept fully clothed
with lamps lit so it seemed to be both night and day
in their rooms: as if they had gone, at last,
to live in a painting by Magritte. They slept
the way the sea sleeps after a storm,
their breathing as even
as a neap tide. I knew sleep was a passage
to a place I could not see, a place
they meant to inhabit without me.
They travelled without luggage or tickets,
travelled the way bears travel through
winter, in caves, like cats on golden rafts
of afternoon sunlight.
—Faith Shearin
Faith Shearin’s (Website) seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry.