In your closed eyes
In your closed eyes are the distant places at the bottom of the cold ocean that are every moment of pure dark and endless cold. In the silver warmth of morning you will lose your place there. Only cramped into a concrete corner will your closed eyes fill with the distant emptiness of the black ocean. Where she sleeps in warm grog there is no encroachment of that horror. Shadows begin in your eyes, beneath your eyelid and flowing down into your pupil. Shadows are shapeless in the dark where their sources cower as well all into liquid and sand sinking piles. You are apart from them. Your face is flat against concrete. The horizon hangs at arms length with the entire world above it. Across the courtyard the walls, the dirt, the shadows immanently float before the horizon. The terrestrial heavens and arched mosaic skies and stucco winds all stand above you. You are pressed into an airless film upon the concrete. In the courtyard the shadows pile foreshortened into unintelligible carpets of bitter light. The bits of light flicker and change shape. In the light of the courtyard the shadows defeat themselves by allowing the light to express absence. Arms, feathery succulents, crossed wires, wavering coats, hands reaching to faces and folded hands on hands looming figures on balconies, and high swaying cypresses haunt the light from her window with their bundle of shadows.