John Morgan
	The Sleepwalker's Husband Harleys crisscrossing the bedroom before breakfast—“What’s that noise?” she yells in panic, dashing out to the hall, and he thinks, Some flash flood you barely woke out of sent you to check on the babies our grown up kids used to be. Roaming the house she grew up in, she spooked the stolid sleepers whose furious shaking left bruises. But some night strollers never wake, so he’s read, being hacked to a deeper slumber by elders who brand them as witches. “Must be the cat,” she says, returning groggy to sleep. Lost in these deltas of reason, he rides the trampoline mattress which archives their mores, as a farmer’s first take on the weather garners metaphors cached in the clouds. And he’s heard her laugh to the shadows at murmured jokes so private he peered through a keyhole on vapor where the primitive life of the mind sends out aerial shoots and the ghosts of the heart reassemble to be bled. Ballad of the Three-Legged Cat Under the comforter, peering out like a thought that leaps with dilated eyes from windowsill to branch or crutch, and settles like a double star, hovering over the jagged marriage of her scar. You’d like to comfort her, speak incantations from a book of hopeful sermons and evoke, as formidable and clear-cut as that magpie on the porch, an orange ur-cat who might temper with her song this three-legged cat. But now she’s backing off into the jazzy fissure of her wound, her beauty undisturbed. The sleep is in her and she sees its structure like a catafalque and knows with her more than human sense of smell the world she purred to wishes her farewell. Ashes of convalescence fall over her bandaged night, a drifting meditation on what it means to stalk, to flee, to pounce, to nose those sweet half-eaten road-kill voles. From a textbook on the tectonics of growth and unemployment the questions surge into a mantle of unremembered days, their lava like salt tuna on her tongue. Until that single offset rear left leg shifts under her, gives center to her wobble, and she hobbles up the stairs, sniffing her puzzled sister who hisses circumspectly as she passes. You who have only two good legs, nerve yourself against fear, and lubricate your heart with prayer, but not too much, as you limp toward saintliness, a stiff but holy, blind, devotional machine.