This is called "Succubus."
And it's a-- so there are two spirits, male and female ones,
a succubus and one's an incubus.
I think, it's succubus that is the female that
will come in the middle of the night and make love to you.
And if you get pregnant, and if you're a woman,
and you're pregnant in the old country,
and you wanted to get away with it, you would say,
they would say, an incubus and a succubus.
Incubus came in the middle of the night, and nothing
to do with the fellow down the street.
"This is not very long poem, but it's a narrative.
She woke and was startled to see it on the sheets next to me
as I slept, in the dimmish little gray light
from the window, a mouth, inert, also gray,
also sleeping, or dead?
Instead of screaming, there's a mouse in the bed,
she rose in her nudity and walked
to the kitchen, the drawer of knives,
and returned, and hovered over the bed, raised the knife,
and stopped, and thought, and thought.
Then, yeah, poked it with the knife.
It gave in to her touch but did not move, didn't even quiver.
So it must surely be dead.
Then thought to wake me, but the slight smile
passing over my face indicating, maybe, I
was having a nice dream.
So what to do?
What to do?
Then it jerked, just a little, gray on the white sheet.
And she jumped back into herself, she would say later.
"Turned on the lamp, and there it
was, between the pillow and the blanket, my wrist."
She poked me, "Wake up honey.
I was going to kill you."
[LAUGHS]
And I opened my eyes to a naked woman,
gray as the statue of a beast we once
saw jutting out from the back wall of a cemetery on the verge
of a vast Polish forest.
And then, my wife's upraised hand, a carving knife,
and on her face, that look I suddenly recognized
and had thought I understood."