Dream Song

The lake solidifies a glassy blue green mountains guard its flanks far beyond the fjords launch out to sea they steal its depth that cuts through stone and never bottoms out *** First let us reject our dreams those torn tissues of the mind let us sculpt their melodrama into marble waves of synapses firing blindly in the dark wood nymphs chase us back to primal desire I slide down a boulder like a sandy hill scraping my hands molding the sun into a ball of flame that sears my wounds singes my arms how I hoped to rescue some sense of self out of the eternal fire When I saw you emerge from the fog it was as if the red hart had materialized in the woods hunters’ noses quivered at the smell of blood and surgically sliced fur why must we thrill at death when life is so full of wonder In the quiet of night the sky batters the keys of noise that keep the stars in motion they sweep the spheres searching for errant notes chasing down celestial music while the rest of us have Chopin and Schubert playing in our heads I say ”us” but are we not alone in this preamble to desiccation of flesh splitting of bone corpuscles petrify like prehistoric logs we lack the fingers to count their rings or extract the sap from their vein-riddled limbs Let us first deflect our dreams feasting on a clarity of consciousness to behold is to be beheld we intrude on every act of knowledge like a spider spinning its web across a porch's peeling pillars Walk past it if you can walk on into the day of death which comes for each of us like a lost letter written from an inkwell of sorrow splotches of tears smear the swirls of Victorian penmanship I would read your missive but I cannot digest 19th-century prose so 1880s so arcane and repressed let me instead recite this poem in darkness firing blindly past the feudal fiefdom of dreams