The Mind at Night
At three in the morning,
the mind becomes a house
where all the doors have been left unlatched.
It doesn’t think of grand things.
It doesn’t solve the equations of the stars
or settle the ancient debts of the heart.
Instead, it watches a single curtain move.
It counts the seconds between the refrigerator’s hums.
It remembers a gray sweater lost in 1994
and wonders where it is keeping warm tonight.
The body lies there, heavy as a fallen log,
perfectly content with being empty.
But the mind is a small animal
that refuses to go into its hole.
It sits on the cold grass of the dark,
looking at the moon,
waiting for the sun to come back
and give it something real to do.
It turns over old coins.
It reads the fine print on labels
of bottles emptied years ago.
You ask it to sleep.
You tell it the day is done,
the ledger is closed,
the witnesses have gone home.
But the mind stays up,
like an old night watchman
who has forgotten what he is guarding,
shining his flashlight into the corners,
just to make sure the dark
is still there.
At three, the mind does not belong to you.
The daytime tenant has packed his bags
and left by the fire escape.
Now the night crew moves in.
They do not turn on the lights.
They work entirely by touch.
They take down the neat scaffolding of the day.
They unscrew the bolts of your certainties.
They pile your quietest shames in the center of the floor
and sit around them like a campfire.
You ask them to leave.
You point to the clock, to the heavy eyelids,
to the morning that requires your presence.
But they only laugh,
a dry, paper-thin sound,
and keep digging up the garden
to show you the roots of things
you thought you had buried for good.
Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.