[Carl Copeland]

The Deccan*

I wouldn’t mind going to bed if, instead
of sleeping the sleep of the dead, I could drowse
to the hum of a long-playing thought and be roused
from gaps between tracks by a click, never dread
the blare of a seven-a.m. resurrection,
which is why, if the night lies ahead of me, it’s
a side upper berth that’s the ticket to bliss,
in a rickety sleeper car crossing the Deccan.
Sliding the aisle curtain shut, I would take
a fetal position, interred in my berth,
and rock in the many-armed, interconnecting
embraces of dreams half-asleep, half-awake,
while a juddering mantra of death and rebirth
is chanted in clacks on the tracks of the Deccan.


* Rhymes with “reckon.” A vast triangular Indian plateau south of the Gangetic plains, between the coastal mountain ranges of the Western and Eastern Ghats.