Shadow

Here is what happens when darkness falls:

countless times down sleep’s blind

alleys and wormholes slipping

through into new dimensions

I wake to find gravity’s laws

         suspended

         superseded

and I go looking for the tiger.

Often I have slept curled

inside her jaws while she pads

along the backbone of the night

her eyes fey and filled with fire

         and in the morning my temples ache

         with the distant rumble of her heart

         beating against my skull.

(See there, her heavy paws have left

impressions so deep they hold the water

after rain

still pools in which my reflection lingers.)

She is not easy

she leaves me uneasy

the quiet thunder of her passing

is a hollowed-out longing

as of a lover lately left

         but I have no memory of a lover

         only tingling along the nerves

         that would leash my tail to my spine.

Last night she found me

and hissed her name into my ear: Chaaya.

Shadow.

Shade walker.

Soul stealer.

If we fear only what we

do not know

then I am a mystery to myself.

The dream tells me this:

in some other world where gravity

pulls things apart and not together

the tiger is me.