Two people lie asleep side by side, and in the morning only one of them talks. That imbalance drives "A rainbow unweaved" by wordsforghosts. The poem starts in the drift of falling asleep and ends in the flat routine of going to work. Its subject is dreams, but its real concern is what happens to imagination, and to poetry itself, once the day begins.
The opening stanza turns sleep into a sea voyage: "we're lost at sea, / each / swell of the surface / is a pull from the deep." The stanza opens and closes on a rhyme, "asleep" and "deep", the only clear rhyme in the poem, and it shuts like a wave over the sleepers. After that the poem drifts in free verse. The word "each" sits alone on its line, so the reader waits for the swell just as a swimmer would. Ellipses carry a sentence across the stanza break ("vibrations… / …light"), so the sound seems to fade into the next image. The senses also blur: light "plays games with sound-waves," and a spiderweb stretches across darkness. Weaving runs through the poem's images, from the title's rainbow to the web to the chrysalis. The title may recall Keats's complaint that cold philosophy will "unweave a rainbow", though that is an inference. If so, the poem is asking whether analysis, or the plain light of day, destroys the beautiful things it examines.
Then comes a deliberately dull sentence: "For hours we remain there / where time has no significance." The abstract wording drains the colour out of the verse and imitates the blankness it describes.
Morning revives the imagery. The mind emerges like "a butterfly crawling / from its chrysalis, / given the gift of one day to live." The dashes around the simile make it feel like a whispered aside, and the phrase "one day" quietly sets a limit on the beauty. Then the partner's dream arrives, and its language is soft. Birds "somehow derail the train," a casual word for a disaster that never lands, and the escape ends with the short lines "& land softly / in a meadow / of wildflowers."
The speaker's reply is a bare sentence on its own line: "I don't speak about my dreams." What follows is much harsher. A crowd tears flesh from bones "with their hands," and that plain phrase makes the violence intimate. A desert that "doesn't grow, but / moves slowly forward / with the eerie movement of mist" contradicts itself, dryness behaving like vapour, which is exactly how nightmares behave.
The final dream is the cleverest. "Last night" shifts the poem into the present, and the dream is a rewriting of the nightmare. The partner gives the speaker lilacs, an echo of the wildflowers. The crowd returns, no longer eating anyone alive but "demand[ing] answers," and it is calmed "with elegant words." The mob that was a threat becomes an audience, and in that version poetry works as a form of protection.
The wake-up is brutal because it is so ordinary: "Then I awoke, / smoked four cigarettes, / showered / shit / dressed." The lines shorten into a list, and the single word "shit" could be a bodily routine or a curse, so it reads as both. No simile or metaphor survives, and the imagery stops when the dream does. The ampersands that gave the earlier lines a hurried, shorthand feel now rush the speaker out of the door: "& went to work."
The poem doesn't argue that poetry matters, and that is why it is believable. It admits that the most hopeful dream is the most painful to wake from. There is also a small irony in the speaker's silence. They say they don't speak about their dreams, yet the poem speaks every one of them. The page becomes the only place where the lilacs and the elegant words exist outside sleep.