Then I Slept Into a Terror World

Then I slept into a terror world
where things gave back my gaze:
baffled grass, a fury tree, dirt
disinterring grief by means of me.

I suffered a river’s memories,
rock’s archaic ache, all the soft
improvisations of the brain-shaped,
breeze-shaped clouds.

I was rifled, pilfered, praised, used.
I was lifted up into the rain’s mania,
laid cadaverously down amid the avid seeps
and intuitive roots, a little slime

of life crawling through me
like an inchoate incarnate thought
beyond god, beyond art, beyond all idea
of beyond. Then I woke with a start.