The School of Night

What did I study in your School of Night? When your mouth's first unfathomable yes Opened your body to be my book, I read My answers there and learned the spell aright, Yet, though I searched and searched, could never guess What spirits it raised nor where their questions led. Those others, familiar tenants of your sleep, The whisperers, the grave somnambulists Whose eyes turn in to scrutinize their woe, The giant who broods above the nightmare steep, That sleeping girl, shuddering, with clenched fists, A vampire baby suckling at her toe, They taught me most. The scholar held his pen And watched his blood drip thickly on the page To form a text in unknown characters Which, as I scanned them, changed and changed again: The lines grew bars, the bars a Delphic cage And I the captive of his magic verse.