A cliffside archangel,
a world of lost souls
and the oceans they drown in;
these are dreams I’ve never had.
I am a fortunate child
of the joyful sea
and with our friend have
sailed its bays, plumbed its
depths and seen the masked
face of God illuminate
the Eastern shore with
his lieutenant shafts of light;
I am the son of an earth
that needs no angels.

But I, too, have seen the end
walking along the dreamy sands
at the end of my life
I was just that:
dust, red and fine,
held together by the superlative
tensions of alpine highs
and petite-mort lows.
When, with such an ecstatic shudder,
our friend’s logical engine halted
a black-winged chess piece
took off around the room;
we live trapped in our cavernous
imaginations. I would ask
St. Michael to protect me
from myself.

You asked what I believed,
dear beautiful mind.
I would live a half-week’s dream
again, to exercise my intelligent self
and hear your visions.
But I didn’t choose
the blackberried fields of England.
I chose instead the sun
and stand to inherit its fortunes.
In my dream I walk a long hallway
only once, trying to peer through
the closed doors.

And so I become like the bag,
I hold things:
a liver, some stale air, temporarily
a chicken bone in my mouth.
Also my stomach, bladder and
welled-up anger;
the body is, after all, a kind
of bag of its own,
a leather sack full of smaller containers.
It moves its various contents
around and pretends it is more solid
than it is. Without my few bones
I would be a frightening blob
on the floor. But, thank God, I retain
that small amount of structure
and meander down the street
carrying my bag
passing a homeless woman with
her clutches of plastic containers
and full of what secrets and treasures,
what necessities of life?

Woman with your ferret
leashed for a walk, what
do you know that I don’t?

II.

I have no seen the
sun for weeks, yet there it is
cloudless and stunning

III.

Terrible sound, terrible joy[1]
the sea moving icebergs
in its mouth[2]

[1] Cf. Sufjan Stevens “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!”
[2] Cf. Bill Holm, “The Icelandic Language”

At least the grounds
are familiar ones,
a bed is a bed,
you needn’t care where
or even its exact dimensions.
The rose is night[2],
terrors and projections
and the shivering
nightmare,
waking to find
the world changed.[3]

It is and is not
we witness many realities
at once and are frightened
but the dream is
what we are become,
and gladly!
It replaces the dull earth
with mysteries;
it staves off our certain death.

[1] Cf. Maxine Kumin, “The Excrement Poem”
[2] Cf. Li-Young Lee, “Rose”
[3] Cf. UKLG, “The Lathe of Heaven”

Anticipation, the measured
breaths before bursting
into the liquor store with a gun
to do the talking,
only there is no liquor store and
no weapon and no war, however
personal. There is individual insignificance
in the shadow of an enormous universe,
there are jobs to do until you die,
there is incalculable and indefinite
loneliness always close at hand.
There are the many challenges
of survival, the certainty of
that enterprise’s eventual failure,
and the equal assurance of
countless smaller prior defeats.

There is always something to worry about.

But equally, we hope, there are
instruments of radiance present
within us: pauses
to admire the striking expansiveness
of a poppy field, new sprouts in
a ruined country, all the things
we don’t have to do.
And, of course, there is the other,
the perfect distraction of human contact,
the mundane discourse of the living
that slows a heart as sureley
as life’s attendant details
frighten it to speed.
There are sources of calm that swell and rain
when we bend toward the most present
of things.