Your hands are small;
Cold
Blue
Your eyes are closed;
Purple,
Bruised.
I wonder where you are;
Dreaming,
Bleeding.
I can feel you in my veins;
Hear you,
Screaming.
But I can see you next to me,
Breathing,
Sleeping.
And I can feel you;
watching tv we're caught
attacked hearts pounding
as the villain
nearly wins
then turn to tea and
crackers again caught, arguing:
was it good
or bad?
and sleep dream caught
in untidy films
dissolved at dawn
by fleeting minutes meals
each hour dissolving
the last hour we are
like actors in and out
of anecdotes
Here in this fat city
Men seventy-two inches short
Have frozen their dreams
Into steel and concrete
Six hundred feet tall
Thin fingers
On the hard hand
Of Chicago's loop
Are these skyscrapers
Rubbing bright sides
Of rainbow stars
Tearing the gray gauze
Of low clouds
Dipping in the sizzling pot
Of a summer sun
Passing the jeweled moon
I would have brought you fire for those nights
When you were cold and lonely and in doubt.
I would have brought you laughter for your tears
And given you new dreams to dream about.
But look away, your eyes are much too bright,
And sorrow has lent beauty to your face,
And should I cast aside this cloak of years
And live forever after in disgrace--
It is an old temptation sprung anew,
Yet must not be.
Ah, look at me and you shall see
I am, my love, as miserable as you!
lust-dreams coloured
of someone forgotten
then I seek him following
heartpaths he left
in the dream
in and out of rooms
without walls he's near,
invisible shines from
his absence
words and gestures
peeled away
our eyes knew
made notes informed our
blood carved
this dream
Troika, troika! The snow moon
whirls through the forest.
Where lamplight like a knife
gleams through a door, I see two graybeards bending.
They're playing chess, it seems. And then one rises
and stands in silence. Does he hear me passing?
Troika, troika! In the moonlight
his spirit hears my spirit passing.
I whip the horses on. The houses vanish.
The moon looks over fields
littered with debris. And there in trenches
the guardsmen stand, wind fluttering their rags.
And there were darker fields without a moon.
I walk across a field, bound on an errand.
The errand's forgotten — something depended on it.
A nightmare! I have lost my father's horses!
Even to dream
may shatter
my world.
What name
did I speak to
the night?
If you saw the fox,
know the fox saw you first,
and not out of the corner of her
eye.
If your breath caught
when image of a precise
snout, wise eyes, thick bristling
stone-and-cinnamon fur struck
your optic den,
know that’s the sort of guiltless,
guileless reverence the best of
the best Beliefs have in mind.
If she returns
to you, taking a path through dream,
know by dawn she
went back to milk-drugged pups.
I dreamt of wings, — and waked to hear
Through the low-sloping ceiling clear
The nesting starlings flutter and scratch
Among the rafters of the thatch,
Not twenty inches from my head;
And lay, half-dreaming in my bed,
Watching the far elms — bolt-upright
Black towers of silence in a night
Of stars, between the window-sill
And the low-hung eaves, square-framed, until
I drowsed, and must have slept a wink . . .
And wakened to a ceaseless clink
Of hammers ringing on the air ...
And, somehow, only half-aware,
I'd risen and crept down the stair,
Bewildered by strange smoky gloom,
Sleep, my love, your way of dream
By the fireflies shall be lighted,
That I gather from the heart of night.
Your father is off, good night,
To buy the honey from the stars :
The city of stars is away a hundred miles.
But by the dawn he will return,
Riding on the horses of the dews,
For you, with a drum as big as the sun
The vision of the sunset light
Of ghostly white :
The day is the twilight perfume
Too full to fly away.
O, Japan in milky July,
What an art of dream untold !
You know, over the blue and deep of the seas,
(O the wilderness of the Pacific!)
Like a lantern in love-air, she sways
In pain that is song.
The thought of her presence (a bit of flesh and love)
Makes the dusk of night the dusk of perfume.
Sudden as a kiss her rings glow ;
Over the dusk strings her fingers flow as a wave.
O the breeze of melody of her heart and that of the night,
The ghost musical that dies into the pang of dream !