The University of Notre Dame

[A Cry from Sleep]Author(s): Larry GraySource: Notre Dame English Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter, 1968), p. 45Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40066454 .

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I considered placing myself inside the eyebrows of that beautiful woman,

Larry Gray

Putting my hands over my ears and holding my knees with my elbows Hearing the swell of the ocean there within that skull I'd be a shrine crouching and drowsy, a foggy thought lost in the foam of the breakers, a forgotten dream left lonely after the tide, lying almost lifeless, no longer panting, staring wildly, quietly, waiting now, waiting behind the eyebrow caught hopefully in the eyes, I can be tasted and told to sleep, or stroked into mutual life and the lovely tangle of eyes, no shrine or shriveled fetus in a brain, but an embracing wakeful washing action of a finite beach.

A cry from sleep talking wildly of some danger approaching. I remember a medium who acted out the cries of a strangled woman and those of her strangler and the necrophiliac moans that followed.

I see streets raped of reason and the undignified face of a city covered with flies, its ear, a toe, a finger gnawed away by rats.

And I wonder about the dung that nourishes flowers, the shit that they so eagerly devour in order to nourish soft lovely petals put in the lapels of assassins. I long for water. I thirst.

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