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I’m just noticing how
my wife seems almost bodiless
asleep under the blanket tumbling chaotically
over the couch’s edge
when
under that same piece of furniture
I see as though seeing into another world
your jumpy shadow.
 
But when you emerge,
all motion and tail and feathery body
you’re truly surprised to find me here in all the silence;
I sit forward in my chair,
and you disappear the way you came.
 
I freeze.
Is this what our apartment is like
when we’re asleep,
tiny creatures flying noiselessly and wildly into the open?
 
Then, after a shocked second you dart into the room again
from another spot this time, a different radius—
you just can’t believe in my silent persistent existence.
But I’m still here, somehow—
again you blink back into the walls to sort it all out.
 
There is a waiting; it seems tensely obvious
that you’ll keep reappearing,
on this radius or that, again and again,
until things work out the way you’re expecting.
 
And something is wrong here,
I think,
for one or both of us—
either you’re too reckless, or too stubborn, maybe,
or I,
just this once,
am too wide awake.