too dramatic a word
for expressing that nobody
ate in the dream

and I couldn’t hear anyone breathe—
but that was how it was.
Salvation showed

its face only after the end of my asking,
to prove that what heaven
there was was there,

in the bright, indifferent yawn
of the empty refrigerator.
It stood, immense

in the face of nothing else, against
the wall, a luminous monument, a
magnificent accident;

A hunger thrummed inside it
like a pulse in the dark hallway of
a throat, strangely

private, so it filled me with the
sense of overhearing someone else’s
inner argument,

of staring down a corridor
whose walls stared back so hard
it almost hurt.

At the end of that hall was a door,
eternally white, inviolate (there is
never not a door

in the dream) and I knew the door would open—
if it would open for me, and it wouldn’t
—onto where the light

was kept. It hummed, Yes,
you, yes, you. It warned, Not yet.
Not knowing how

I knew, I knew my penance was to
stand here on the edge of several
prepositions,

to let electric brightness knife
across my face until
I woke (or else

forever) and never
to enter that
glow

of metallic
immaculate
cold.