23. NOCTURNE
You who diagnose the heart of night
who in massive sleeplessness have heard
a door shutting, a carriage’s far sound,
a vague echo, a tiny noise …
At the moments of mysterious silence
when the unremembered arise,
at the hour of the dead, the hour of rest —
you will know how to read these acrid lines.
— Rubén Darío, “Nocturne”
It’s dark. I can’t sleep.
There’s no clock, yet my body knows the time to the minute as if reading it on a glowing dial. Every cell in my brain a clock face stamped with the hour.
2:45 a.m.
I lie here, wide awake in “the dark night of the soul.”
No soil smothers my face, no dirt weighs down my limbs. I can breathe. In other respects I may as well be buried alive.
Save for a sliver of light seeping through one of the big triangular windows (n
