In the Night

In the middle night, in middle America — a small tremor, not enough to scare the cat, but the cat knew, and it told the mice who lived in the walls. ‘It wasn’t us’, they said. A mess on my desk. The thin vase with its lone chrysanthemum toppled. Spilled water printing a figure, smudged ink on my poem fragment — moth shaped, and in the middle a human form - man-moth? I saw my cortical cortex sliced for microscopic examination. I envisioned giant wings landing on a tiny earth planet. I thought of ripple effects, how all things run to the middle when tremors threaten. Across the midpoint of the rug the cat has fallen asleep. The ink-image crawls away. its wet wings drooping. I push it back to the middle. Fragmented poetry should stay where I abandon it. One night I dreamt of flying through my own head – I was a small light in the middle of an endless blackness. Strangely I was glad to be the center of nothing at all. Then from my small light a deep voice intoned as if it were a large mouse in a full moon: it said: middle, middle, middle.