Illuminated Manuscript

Like motes embedded in the vitreous humor, the odd, unsorted
cryptographs of memory and blood underwrite our lives in texts,
it seems, we’ve somehow lost the sense to read; and yet, setting aside
my book last night, I thought for a moment I could just make out,
beneath the fluent features of your sleeping face, the mute particulars
of a dream begin, its self-reflecting secrets start to ramify and clear.

Your eyelids quickened, and your brow took on the worried look of someone
reading on a garden bench (October sunlight fretting the page) a story
that might’ve been her own. A story enciphered with those same bright photons
and free-floating threads which, when the lamp’s turned off, or the eyelid
closes on a sun-touched page, resolve into our field of vision as a lost cuneiform
of burnished signs whose meanings we’ve somehow unknowingly become.