Earth Room

In sleep I feared my soul would divide,
range free, having shrugged off the body,
go down to my basement where I once slept walked as a child,
our official childhood photographs, tilted a nail’s width.

My feet glided like that to the Earth Room,
behind a nondescript door in Soho where an angel sat
at a desk & pointed to the sign: no pictures,
for aren’t angels always pointing at things

and forbidding you to take them? The dirt was undulant, pure black,
verdant, like Walter de Maria’s hair, filled a former gallery
packed in since 1977 for me and this other guy
to gaze at in awe and when I turned away I saw

him wave to a man across the street in a window,
just transferring things from box to box,
exactly how my feet moved in sleep walk
all hoard and squander crushed like thyme under each sole.

You aren’t supposed to wake sleepwalkers, moving toward
their sure destination, for the soul is shameless about orders.
That dirt was dark as cake. Since the artist forbid reproduction
I took a memory instead of you, love, smiling under a great stair.