Hotel Gabriel

Richard Foerster

I woke in alien dark to a babble
of plumbing through the walls
and an AC’s rushed but whispered
intimacies with the night.

Even my own breath’s shallow ebb
and flow seemed oceanic
in that room circling around
some invisible and shaky axis.

I was lost, but through the keyhole’s
tiny Moorish arch, which opened
onto the empty corridor’s furnace of light,
came a trickle from the near beyond,

and I could trace an illumined stream
which hovered in the sudden now
angelic air, and see once more, though dimly,
our knotted sheets, their cankered glow.