DAUERNARKOSE Poem by Mary O’Donoghue

She has been asleep for three days,
a liquid length of time

closed over her head like a sheet
of lake-water. They think they have

her dreams cached away
in their clutterbook of explanans,

and see no flicker hint from behind
eyelids fern-stitched with blue veins.

But she is navigating equations,
pointed fir jungles of isosceles

triangles, the screams of chalk
and nails like seagull voice, dust

of chalk a scurf on her cuffs.
She walks past the bossy sign-posts

of sine and tan, and her map begins
to make sense, when the two-legged

travel stool of pi is pulled from under
her and she is splashed awake. She leaves

infinity, her last mark, a slender eight
sleeping with its face to the wall.