76 Dreams poems

Sometimes I dream what’s called the male dream : I’m going somewhere not too far away, I’m almost there, When there’s a slight delay—a minor detour of no consequence, But then another, and another, as I get farther and farther Away from my initial destination, which becomes inaccessible. Before I left Berlin I went to Venice, a city that reminds me of that dream. However close you are to where you want to go, the compound Turnings of its narrow passageways and alleys carry you relentlessly away, Until you dead-end at a small canal that’s nowhere on your map. The late, wrecked century that started in Berlin, where all roads lead— I thought I’d find, if not the truth exactly, then at least an inkling Of some fantasy that lay beneath the placid surface of the day, The remnants of some dream so many people had to die for. Instead, I watched the boats go by, and clouds traverse the sky Above an unreal city floating on the water. We’re sure at first That something lies beyond the facts and books, but then we realize it isn’t there. Whatever lay behind the slaughter wasn’t in the world, Existing merely in the heart, in memory, in someone’s imagination, Places harboring nothing real. To try to see it is to watch it disappear, Stranding you a life away from where the unimaginable began, Staring blankly at your own face floating in the water.

Amant in bed, dreaming. There are no borders to this miniature. B moves Bateau across the night. It is all the loops can do to let their gilding bulge with what is there. One light on the wide sea. The bones of stars. No other country is so curiously watered. From the estuaries to the very sources of its inwardtending channels, it rises in fogs which are themselves arterial. For its earth has more than once been seen quite early in the morning to lighten and give way. At the gate to the garden, Fair Welcome. She raises her hand. Salutare: to greet and to save. Leisures of tendrils are on all sides, winding with the snails through white acanthus and discarded badges of pilgrims. You may assign to the nineteen portholes in these borders whatever you like. The sand is of such fineness and the flow so singly clear that nothing seems to pass through, golden, and with all its lights. Water makes very much the best portable horizon. While its reflections are fainter than those in the speculum, their angles may be measured accurately and the differences from a true meridian reckoned by the clock. These sightings should be taken at least three hours before and after noon. Two liveried falconers, the jesses and bells, the gloves. Amant with the dove’s neck-ring, The lady in her chamber. Winter trees, rooks in the white branches, hounds, the dying boar. On the top of a mountain a lion waving his tail. The general course of the river straightens, and is moderately timbered. Scattered islands covered w/willow. Across from a single, long bluff of open rock, the plain to the S. is higher, extending quite to the mountains which contain still great quantities of snow. A small creek falls in from this side. Pursued its bottom for perhaps 4 m. Cottonwood. Much evidence of beaver. Now all of this is to be understood in a spiritual manner. Let us cover the nakedness of our fathers with the cloak of a favorable interpretation. Under a dry stalk of burdock, iron-brown latches and fittings, a few nails. The bulls are eating apples. Thick grasses sweat through the whole pasture. Dame Reason with her chaplet of apothegms. He should put his heart in a single place only. The truest things about bodies are their shadows. Pleas put me back in the water I am Paddle-to-the-Sea She has done this before. She wades into the current to the one point where the current lounges at her hips. She stands there. With all the time in the world, steadily, she kneels steadily deeper, to her shoulders, smiling, her hair cupped in both hands behind her neck. The Familiar gives Its first lesson to the lover. A new order is one that is renewed hourly. A drove of geese in its tall, while file plucks home through the wet fallow. Hedges darken between the fields. Along the wolds for miles in level tracts, haze from the lime-kilns. All quarters of the sky are wintry, huge. We could no longer be sure that we had passed the Préveranges. Freshets from the little stream poured onto the lane, filling ruts and drainages. In the dusk, and with our shoes soaked, we set off through a meadow, and another, and found soon an abandoned cottage of some old forester. We determined that I should stay and secure it as an outpost. Meaulnes went on alone. At an earlier hour, the ground at the wood’s edge illumines to some thousand footcandles, fades under the canopies, the layers of trees, of shrubs and herbs, under the dark itself, brighter by as many eyes as are buried there. Tied to a washboard, submerged, the panes of glass chime like clean ice. they are dangers harebells and just where the fall goes over they lean into the spray so far and bob so on their stems they thrill and a hammer rings carillon down the cows spine feel it there it goes again Death hath its seat close to the entrance of delight. —Gudique Sifting over porches and limp hibiscus, rust from the canvas awnings, its red spores dull in a moon that shows everything, houses and driveways, fishponds, all of them hiding from their insides, forgetting, looking around. there is no way to lie down and not lie in the same way that someone has had to lie thinking of how far it is to the places no one goes or to any place this far from the beds where the dying cry into the night this far Deacons and presbyters. The Laying On of Hands. In a vial, juice from the wild cucumber, powdered glass, the divine Endura.

I dreamed this mortal part of mine Was metamorphosed to a vine, Which crawling one and every way Enthralled my dainty Lucia. Methought her long small legs and thighs I with my tendrils did surprise; Her belly, buttocks, and her waist By my soft nervelets were embraced. About her head I writhing hung, And with rich clusters (hid among The leaves) her temples I behung, So that my Lucia seemed to me Young Bacchus ravished by his tree. My curls about her neck did crawl, And arms and hands they did enthrall, So that she could not freely stir (All parts there made one prisoner). But when I crept with leaves to hide Those parts which maids keep unespied, Such fleeting pleasures there I took That with the fancy I awoke; And found (ah me!) this flesh of mine More like a stock than like a vine.

The room I entered was a dream of   this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of   a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

The room I entered was a dream of this room. Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine. The oval portrait of a dog was me at an early age. Something shimmers, something is hushed up. We had macaroni for lunch every day except Sunday, when a small quail was induced to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things? You are not even here.

1 I close my eyes and I see a dot. It becomes a spot of light. It grows into the size of a person who distances away until it returns to a spot of light, a dot. 2 Like communion bread, your words dissolve in my mouth and never die. 3 I don’t care under which sky — just sing your song till the end. 4 The bone-city I am choked by is also salt also sugar also boiling water in the kettle with no lid. 5 Ask not how many houses were built. Ask how many residents remained in the houses. 6 The flame opens like a giant plant swallowing them one by one with their lost and found sheep. 7 She whose song has no beginning nor end — She whose voice faded into stars and moons — Where is she? Where is she? 8 Dreams come in two types: vertical and horizontal. Tell me the shape of your dream and I will tell you where you come from. 9 Fire and light both sting. We go to sleep when the other half of the globe wakes up. Night and day crammed with dreams. 10 Your look passes through me like lightning. 11 The butterfly that flew a moment ago over the killed ones was the soul searching for home. 12 Our time together has ripened and smashed like berries. 13 Can your camera capture fear in the eyes of mother-sparrow, see the broken eggs in her eyes? 14 A little air means so much for the bird. In the air, a full world extends. The clouds gather and then separate. The leaves wave to each other. For the bird, everything hangs in the air. 15 The pomegranate seeds scattered with our steps were not from heaven. 16 My paper boat that drifted into the river with the world behind it had a special note. It may arrive one day, although late, all truths come late. 17 Dried leaves over there our first yearnings. 18 The shoes by the door will not fit them when they return. 19 She counts the pebbles by her fingers. The other pebbles under water are losses outside her hands. 20 Specks of sand scattered from the fingers our people. 21 The sun reveals a hole in the boat, a glow in the fins of fish still breathing. 22 The day and the night divide our steps on the road as they equally divide the world. 23 I was born. I write poetry. I will die. 24 Her shadow is still here feeding the birds.

1. It unfolds and ripples like a banner, downward.  All the stories come folding out.  The smells and flowers begin to come back, as the tapestry is brightly colored and brocaded.  Rabbits and violets. Who asked you to come over?  She got her foot in the door and would not remove it, elbowing and talking swiftly.  Gas leak? that sounds like a very existential position; perhaps you had better check with the landlord. This was no better than the predicament I had just read about.  Now it was actually changing before my eyes.  Sometimes it will come to a standstill though, and finally the reflection can begin. Selfless—that was the proposition.  Smiling and moving instantly there was no other purpose than that which brought them there, to be in a particular place. 2. This time the mule gave its face away.  Take your cadillac where you want to go in the morning, convertible as it might be, and enjoy a good bottle of rum. Running on this way she used various modes of expression that were current.  Nothing seemed to bring the woods any closer. What Woods, she was questioned, realizing that as far as the woods went, they were largely inhabitable through the facility of her mind.  At the Philadelphia Flower Show, an ideal situation was built up.  Here through various regulated artificial conditions, spring grass, waterfalls, the newly-sprouted bulbs completed her ideal concept of nature.  The smell was overpowering. All right then.  She had a thing about nature, from flower show glamor and enormous greenhouses the rich cultivated. A beauty of cultivation—in living?  Hastiness did not prevent her from rising quick and ready to misnomers and other odd conclusions, throwing the telephone book to the floor, “OH OH the life I am entangled in.”  Four sides of it. Above was a paradisical level, incompleted.  With working possibilities. Below, endless preoccupations and variations were possible. Currently in vogue were shelves, the vacuum cleaner, a new bedspread and color scheme for pillows. Taste treats were unresponsive.  Glamor do’s were out.  Conversation was nil. Languid she could not even find a place to languish upon that was fulfilling in its own way. So out of the lifelessness that was around her, the grape leaves drying out, and even though the avocado was sprouting, she thought, Why not fantasy?  Tugging at this character and that, trying to push a little life in a prince or a charmer, a half- blind bat, dryad, the works of the story teller.  Here the four walls of the room and ceiling became apparent again.  “I ought to tighten down and make sure I say exactly what I mean.” And her face took on a tight pinched expression, and thrifty scotch economy gave her shrewd eyes in the prescribed way.  Use every tidbit,usefully.  Once upon a time there was a princess who had a long white fur coat with a high fluffy collar, and inside the coat were stitched beautiful butterflies in many bright colors. The princess languished.  She was not sure where to sit to her best advantage to enjoy herself the most.  She could not go in her mind or out.  She looked at her long white hand, I am the Queen of the High Mountain Hag, she murmured to herself, still knowing she was a princess.  She lay down upon the floor as if it were the garden of eden, the coat spread around her. No, that poor little house she had built was a bore.  It’s better that it go up in flames, as it did. She went down to Grand Central Station and gave away flowers. Some people took them and some people didn’t. 3. I’m glad to get back.  I had to repeat a rough discontinuous journey. Questioning myself all along the way.  Was I jumping on her because her time had come to an end.  Indeed I pounded on his arm all night, over his concern for this soft-spoken individual, I can see nothing but their softness.  Me ME, and the time we might spend together, reading and talking, to tear away that putrid husk. My flippancy is gone.  Now I have started my secret life again, in transition, reminding.  As the moth reminds, its feeble antenna groping, taken like a stalk of fern, coins of money. All over I was shaking as the fear and tension made itself apparent. It was a cold night out.  It was colder still between the airy gaps, between blankets. You can see she is thoughtful as she draws the string to the bow.  Where to go indeed.  The point is brought forward and discussed very cleverly. A sleeping angel or a sleeping troll?  I was rather proud of being used, pushing the clothing hampers up and down the downtown street.  Here, pleasant mentors conveyed their anxious solicitations, drawing from their bags, long lists of memorandum due, what I owed. It was a lot, if I hesitated.  I choose to go on, saying this is the way I go, owing nothing, being that kind of person.  Hung up? That thought intrudes as the clearly marked vista is not so clearly marked.  Certainly one supposes in all honesty, that an essential core of feeling blooms in each encounter.  Lost under the weight of the garbage of who are you that you are not making apparent. Thus unhappy, I don’t want it to be this way, and so forth. Not costumes, or paraphernalia, the immediate reactions. 4. We of course are in a family situation.  Anything I wish might happen, but the larger situations are not real, not to be considered possible, discussable as to what sense of reality they possessed. In the snow, the wood piled up underneath.  Oh those drifting sensibilities.  At this point it is scarcely believable that people gather and like each other.  Eating chocolate pudding, getting in touch with some other sense of alikeness.  The form is no longer obvious to me.  Whether they meander or are joined together in their senses in the mechanics or regular grooves they run along. I suspect that in this house, this place that is musty and left as it was some years ago, there is no real fear; the objects are old and I am not familiar with them, only the sense that the Ghost or spirit world strikes you with its familiarity, pleasurable fear. Here the familiar is apt to make its presence known, at any moment the unexpected lurk in the hall, into the room.  Pieces of leather, old silken fans laid upon the table top, rooms filled with something left unexpectedly terror is the wrong combination of ignorance.  It contains its own self with dusty fragments of velvet and fringe.  100 pieces of voice with no name, called it myself, as they spoke all day, sucking the soft slush, admitting their real deficiencies as— I am never sure; Oh it’s that power and disease of believing in the stale that doesn’t demand a real climate, takes its capacity when the demons come down. 5. The night passes in night time.  The head moving to the shoulder, the head rising with a frown. In a firm voice, it doesn’t matter if the hair is flying from undue spring breezes, the self has been raptured on the wine that produces appropriate madness, and sad she says, my dear the bacchanal is a lovely way to be rid of waste. However, in seeing the house more manageable, one cannot even have fear larger than the unknown portions of the continent which refuses to sink. There once was a woman who grew older, not that she minded, but the passage of time was always constant.  Why does one have to contend with that she said, puzzled, as she got carried along, and constantly had to think up new coping modes of behavior.  If he behaved to me thus when he was 40, now that I am 30, I can hardly behave like that to those that are 20, and so forth.  There wasn’t any model except the one she built, and one could scarcely believe there was no established pattern.  This offered wonderful possibilities, but also indecision and gutlessness. 6. You can’t see them, all bundled up, all those that choose to move other than where the distance seems appealing.  Knowledge has no depth.  There isn’t any message to be spoken. Wrangling, she speaks ill-advised my dear, as the cat has no point in laying its head down.  She ought to watch carefully. The claws.  It could be the bent hands, as they grow, that as the fur impeaches the rose, doesn’t make the thing she hangs her body on any realer. What could it be all about?  The necessity to follow, balancing, contemplating words, as the basis of why we move at all. Just a little touch.  The leader cautioned further progression. I could hardly listen to the music for long.  Now there seemed to be interruptions, pleasurable interludes, nothing definite, of a fragmented nature. Certainly I wished the best for all.  The sadder soldiers stumbled idly, as I also in the profound reaches of my slumber noted the elegant turns, the twisting statements grooving into the language building something to listen to.  The dress made from silk.  Trusting was awkward and not of a nature to ease any further building.  Whosoever you revere will come back tenfold upon you and lighten the burden carried as those who desire the warmth and necessity of communication. 7. I am sure my dreams must have been of the wrong sort.  However, as dreams are reflections of inner dilemmas, how did those arise, from a day of relaxation and summer enjoyment of the fund. Knowledge comes from what purported strike?  From that which cleanses, and let us knot say “heart” but tissue.  Hopefully and helpfully I have built up a language in which to talk myself to sleep.  Not for purposes of letting in the cold. However, I have found that not all blockaded against is the cold, the dreary reign of the dead, etc., and tasteless realm of the mushroom.  As much can be denied as the bilious sun strives to cause an enlargement of singing in the back of the neck and the head.  That is uncorraled ecstasy.  I call it enthusiasm, free energy. But it has no place to land, it is bursting and unfocused; it is a real force and the counterpart of the gloomy depths. As the pieces of the house ooze sap, blossoms and green twigs burst from the cracks.  Whether or not to join in what I was half committed to see and do. 8. At this point, when Jack picked up the pussy willow branches, I said they can’t possibly be ours for the taking, and smiled with dedication to an older Con Edison man.  The buildings were like the unexplored garbage in my mind, fascinating and dirty, pulling pieces of cloth from boxes left overnight.  Energy as limitless possibility, in the attempt to transmit non-energy situations. For example, if once I stop to realize what little gets through, I am much more interested in the cover than the contents; it is difficult to find any interest in anything.  Good energy displaces bad karma. And other non entities like that sort, producing flow that in its own place has a good bed, stocked well with what can be called fleet-footed fishes, and approaching places of investigation, such as relations between. As I saw the blood flow to the surface of his skin, I forgot to watch for the telltale visions that again might come from something I have never seen; more possibly the components of what every man views.  If this was a possibility, the rays from every person converging pass through the state of shock to numbness to unity without any mind at all, for this horror fits the cat on the stairs, between the fifth and sixth rung.  This is the way people glow and pulse similar to an inlet of jellyfish blocking the way, full of human life; until I who will name myself a swimmer come along and refuse to be blocked on the way, although I turn back gladly, and will again swim through for it is possible they do not kill, the sting’s compounded measure is fear, and thus one not need join the broad expanse of human mouths calling people to join their ranks to comfort their newfound recognition or orifices, stomachs and legs. I reminded myself twice there were several stories that kept continuing themselves.  She ignored her face, blotched and red upon times, but fuller.  Did you forget to wax and wane?  Her head was full of energy brought forward and positively that what was said would turn the obvious into color, but no sense.  Sense was for the thinkers.  Here the thinkers forgot their word orders or sense; it was better to give them coffee, and those off worse could smoke. I had felt very foolish when I leaned forward and grasped his hand, with effort, and his cloak slipped down over one shoulder as he shouted, which is the way.  And I followed for certainly no one would follow me.  As the day is cold and colder, and what comes out of the head is of its own sort and nature.  These words, like Nature, and Head, Thinking and Words, repeat themselves, as the lines of landscape, attics and other closed-off sections have reprimanded themselves by repetition.  Light was such an enormous possibility.  Taking sight into a frenzy, it was possible that just to look was full of excitement and wonder, for ages at a time, things appeared as beautiful, the sky, the street where cars had gone by. I worried about certain characters: ones that never seemed to be other than puzzles to me but I was drawn to them with certainty only because there seemed to be no understanding? As when the mysteries were performed, the house then itself became distilled with reason as the pots and pans were used apparently filled with the stuff of continuity.  The sorrow that each day sinks into the infertile other side of day, where voice comes out of the dark, and does its rituals.  Memory has its own screen across the room to view itself, and the continuous dwelling of conjecture takes permanent form in stiff-legged walks to remind, thus on and on the breathing goes. New York. January – March, 1967

“I know kung fu.” It won’t bring back the world. 5:15 a.m.: I wake from another dream, the same as every dream. A man builds a ship in my chest. Each of the sailors carries by her breast a picture of her sister. The ship is not the image of a ship. Beyond its sails there are no stars. The water is only water because it’s black. 5:15 a.m. Perhaps you’ve seen me practicing my moves in the empty prison yard and wondered whether you were the dreamer conjuring me into existence from the bare desire to caress a phantom ship and my death the death of your desire.

Oh, come to me in dreams, my love! I will not ask a dearer bliss; Come with the starry beams, my love, And press mine eyelids with thy kiss. ’Twas thus, as ancient fables tell, Love visited a Grecian maid, Till she disturbed the sacred spell, And woke to find her hopes betrayed. But gentle sleep shall veil my sight, And Psyche’s lamp shall darkling be, When, in the visions of the night, Thou dost renew thy vows to me. Then come to me in dreams, my love, I will not ask a dearer bliss; Come with the starry beams, my love, And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

I was born in Speckled Eggs Garden. I will die on Broken Egg Farm. I’m hopping between them now, I consider everything to be friendly and nothing dubbed. I am a chick with legs and yellow hair. Oh Lord Almighty, creator of all things beautiful and sick, who prefers another life on top of this, who are you to judge? When Adam and Eve vanished solemnly into the dark, shrouding themselves in the forest, I was timid and nibbling and stayed behind, betrayed only by the plucking of my beak upon the ground you so graciously provided (thanks). I did noth with the best, I am nothing now, do ye noth with me or not? Hear me now before I break O Lord of the Margent, Lord of noth and straw and all things sent far, cheerio, sincerely, I sleep on one leg too!