Sleep Drops Its Nets By Jean Valentine

Sleep drops its nets for monsters old as the Flood;

You are not you, no more than I am I;

If our dead fathers walk the wall at night

Our hands when we wake up are white on white

Betraying neither wounds nor blood;

The voice is mist that made us cry.

And then day sweeps the castle dry.

From “The Yale Younger Poets Anthology,” edited by George Bradley (Yale University Press: 306 pp., $16 paper)