The Dream Play

What night-rule now about this haunted grove? The spirits have dispersed, the woods faded to grey from midnight blue leaving a powdery residue, night music fainter, frivolous gods withdrawing, cries of yin and yang, discords of the bionic young; cobweb and insects, hares and deer, wild strawberries and eglantine, dawn silence of the biosphere, amid the branches a torn wing — what is this enchanted place? Not the strict groves of academe but an old thicket of lost time too cool for school, recovered space where the brain yields to nose and ear, folk remedy and herbal cure, old narratives of heart and hand, and a dazed donkey, starry eyed, with pearls and honeysuckle crowned, beside her naked nibs is laid. Wild viruses, Elysian fields — our own planet lit by the fire of molten substance, constant flux, hot ice and acrobatic sex, the electric moth-touch of desire and a new vision, a new regime where the white blaze of physics yields to yellow moonlight, dance and dream induced by what mind-altering drug or rough-cast magic realism; till morning bright with ant and bug shines in a mist of glistening gism, shifting identities, mutant forms, angels evolved from snails and worms.