The Lonesome Dream

In the America of the dream the first rise of the moon swings free of the ocean, and she reigns in her shining flesh over a good, great valley of plumped, untrampled grasses and beasts with solemn eyes, of lovers infallibly pitched in their ascendant phase. In this America, death is virginal also, roaming the good, great valley in his huge boots, his shadow steady and lean, his pistol silver, his greeting clear and courteous as a stranger’s who looks for another, a mind to share his peaceable evenings. Dreaming, we are another race than the one which wakes in the cold sweat of fear, fires wild shots at death., builds slippery towers of glass to head him off, waylays him with alcohol traps, rides him down in canyons of sex, and hides in teetering ghost towns. Dreaming, we are the mad who swear by the blood of trees and speak with the tongues of streams through props of steel and sawdust, a colony of souls ravaged by visions, bound to some wild, secret cove not yet possessed, a place still innocent of us.