The Eden of the Author of Sleep

By Brian Teare b. 1974 Brian Teare

for Jean

And sleep to grief as air is to the rain,

upon waking, no explanation, just blue

spoons of the eucalyptus measuring

and pouring torrents. A kind of winter.

As if what is real had been buried

and all sure surfaces blurred. Is it me

or the world, risen from beneath?

Mind refining ruin, or an outside

unseen hand, working—as if with

a small brush, for clarity—the details?

To open my eyes is the shape of a city

rising slowly through sand. Cloudy

quartz, my throat, cut unadorned

from the quarry, stone of city cemetery

and roads, to breathe is a mausoleum

breached. To think of Eden is speech

to fill a grave, tree in which knowledge

augurs only its limits, the word snake

a thought crawling in the shadow

of its body. Was it, Adam, like this

always, intellect in the mind’s small sty

miming confinement for meaning, sleep

to grief as air is to the rain, upon waking,

the world’s own weapons turned against it—

Brian Teare, “The Eden of the Author of Sleep” from Ploughshares (Winter 2002-2003) and forthcoming in 2010 in Pleasure (Ahsahta Press). Copyright © 2002 by Brian Teare.

Source: Ploughshares (2002)

Biography

Born in Athens, Georgia, Brian Teare grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He received a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Alabama and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University in 2000. His collections of poetry include The Room Where I Was Born (2003), winner of the Brittingham Prize and the 2004 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and Sight Map (2009).

Teare was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative . . .

Continue reading this biography