episode in a wood

By Anthony DiMatteo

I pitched next to a graveyard,
afraid but relieved by how little 
noise the dead made, glad they

slept better than I ever could, 
tossed in dreams, hearing voices,
morphing everything into them,   

the hoot of an owl or the pulse
of a cricket, the beck and call
of the dead everywhere in the  

nowhere I lay down in, soft 
as a pile of manure, fetid   
though nowhere to be seen. 

No one dreams the dream
of the dead. If dreamt, 
no one wakes to tell it.

Photograph by Alexandre Brondino