The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin

Invocation to Sleep

372 Invocation to Sleep Come Sleep, O Lady Sleep, From earth horizon, From the far darkness Come to me swiftly! Come cover me with the breast feathers of oblivion As a mountain is covered with cloud, Let me be streaked with sleep As the mountain with fine rain, Till all my thought goes from me And I am washed clean of remembrance. Come, O Comfortress, Come with your seven dark roses, Lay them upon my eyeballs, seared With seeing what I would not, Cover my ears, astonied With life’s refusals; Bind them upon my thought’s thorn pointed insistence; And the darkest, lay upon my heart. Let me know sleep as a weight, As the uncoffined feel earth pressure Firming the stir of dissolution. O Lady Sleep, Priestess-enchantress, having lapped me In seven fold blackness, Show me thy cloak’s lining. Show me patterns of great queens stayed By untouchable ancient loyalties As heroes on locked shields 373 Of sweating soldiery. Show me great courtesans Safe curtained by golden rain That with its mellow clinking muffles The wolf howl, Under whose fall unstinted Never gnaws the mouse, anxiety. Show me dead kings in rock chambers Ringed with choice and subtle possession, Necessaries subdued to the king’s touch With gold chased on ivory; Wall pictures wherewith slaves assuaged Insatiable lack; morning wind on the wild rice, Waterfowl hazy with speed, Lotuses of light Such as loved women’s faces bloom into. O Sleep, at thy poorest Let in the day-hunted quarry To lair under thy thick garment And lose for a space the sound of pursuing! O Lady Sleep Priestess-enchantress Come to me swiftly! Editor’s Notes AU 260: first draft and three subsequent drafts or carbon copies, all legible. ...