Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


I

The night's surveillance. Its heavy breathing
even in the day it hides behind.
Enough is enough for anyone, and so
you crossed your brilliant room, threw up the shade
to catch the night pressed hard against the glass,
threw up the sash and looked it in the eye.
Yet it did not stare you out of your own mind
or roll into the room like a black fog,
but sat there at the sill's edge, patiently,
like a priest into whose hearing you confessed
every earthly thing that tortured you.
While you spoke, it reached into the room
switching off the mirrors in their frames
and undeveloping your photographs;
it gently drew a knife across the threads
that tied your keepsakes to the things they kept;
it slipped into a thousand murmuring books
and laid a black leaf next to every white;
it turned your desk-lamp off, then lower still.
Soon there was nothing in that soundless dark
but, afloat on nothing, one white cup
which somehow had escaped your inventory.
The night bent down, and as a final kindness
placed it in your hands so you'd remember
to halt and stoop and drink when the time came
in that river whose name was now beyond you 
as was, you found indifferently, your own.