3 A.M.
Who is awake but the nightwatchman?
Or the grim laborer in the graveyard
Shift? The spirit world is in transit—
Souls of the newdead drift
Like floating lanterns
Over a river woven with ghosts.
Somewhere at the crossroads of night
A man will come to the vanishing line
Of his life. All the world he’s known
Closes into a clock of smoke;
In that final unannullable hour
The self is torn from time and calendar:
Mind undresses from body,
Its clothes of blood and bone.
As it crosses through the door of death
The spirit reaches the lips of the unknown
And sings
Through it:—
Newborn
Into nothingness,
Mind floats through starlight
Like an oarless boat along the coastline.
What is ghost
But the echo of a man
As he roams his native hills and roads and home?
He wears the mist
In his hair,
His voice: the hounds of wind.
This veil
Between the living and the dead
Is smoke-thin
Here in the wrecking hour of deep night
Where we lie awake and listen
For the white wolf to arrive.