morning waking up essay

A small crack in the egg-smooth walls of sleep, and I can sense a day circulating around me. Thin air holds images: a man sweeping trodden debris of dream off city sidewalk one hour before any pedestrian footfall. Shy birds made of confusion and tissue paper. Dissipating, those intent silent seconds when one listens in vain to pull full sentences from the soft dinner-party murmur of dreams and reality. To sort the sounds of the real bedroom from the mingling sounds of the Protean. The world opens up between my eyelids, and my eyelids open onto white ceiling or white wall.

A breath-filled space where I keep who I am.

This is the absence to watch with wonder--I can't learn such blankness, can't buy it or excavate it from the day's events no matter how I dig, such blankness is already vanishing as I begin reflexively to find myself. I am: the unmarked margin of a book. A faint vibration. The sound of something far away. I am: a radio tuned to soft inchoate static. A tingling at the tips. I am: this hand, curled like a fern.

I used to believe that the first thing I saw wh...

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...any billions of lungs.

You've got to groan when you stretch, you've got to make some sort of noise. You've got to stretch your voice taut, stretch your arms to the side and top like a child's drawing of a sun extending crayon rays of light.

Miraculous to know that you still work.

And weather is stretching over the window-scape, some sort of weather--clouds or a blue sky pulled tight over black-bound arpeggios of stars. I get up and go to the window, rumpled with sleep, a wrung sponge dripping lazy dreams.