Dark Matter

By Stephen Sexton

To convey sleeping people on the weird of track through the ancient dark of coastal rock, matrix

of limestone, basalt, wind, the driver punctures always further into his cone of headlights.

What it will be like, when it happens one day, is sleep’s seductive rhetoric; the giving into its ellipsis.

But the driver is not the train, the train not the engine. Against velocity the inspector walks

between the sleepers (of which I am one) whose doubles in the windows travel unticketable and free, to the last carriage where the long-lost verb of my name in my mother’s voice transcends time and space.

And I’m not the astronomer who says the dark matter holding things just together— bodies and planets,

the arms of galaxies— is the same black fabric dream throws its mysteries on; who by not knowing knows it.