On the Escape of a Dream (from No Voyage 1963)
Trees pull up their polished roots and run;
Rivers, if they please, pause in their flight.
Birds hover and sing in syllables;
Lovers and friends, in curious masks, glide over the lawn.
The moon and stars wander the sky with the sun.
And I am persuaded how all these familiars, that seem
In some awful pressure to speak and fear of telling,
Have turned earth into the heart’s empirical city,
And hide in gallop and gilt the thread of logic
Offered in the rapid illogical lectures of dream .. .
I remember traveling in a gingham land:
I see the dragon in the dragonfly;
I open up the wind-wry fruit and find
The paper heart of apples. Only the blood
Reads it like sediment, can understand.
I remember spectrums flooding my blinkered gaze.
I dance with creatures wrapped in dominoes,
I marvel the high trees in which, unheeded,
In anagrams or arabic, the birds
Sing on, sing on the chapters of my days.
And when the birds splash in their leaves and shout
Farewells, and my friends fail in their crumbling masks,
And the dragon dons his lace, then what pure news,
What grammar of myself among my selves
Falls, like a candle? As the moon burns out
And the birds of day take over the hills of night,
Dawn wrinkles back; in very sleep I stir,
Feeling, like sand, the failure climb my blood;
Till the five wild gods open their diamond eyes,
And I wake, and fall through Lethe into light.
A Game of Children
In the first darkness
I watch the two boys and their sister
Running under the warm stars,
With coiled muscles and the ardent
Certainty that their fingertips can graze
The sharp hoof of a light
An instant in the acme of a leap
Before their leaping feet come back to earth.
And watching later
The night grass rise from the marks of their small shoes,
I remember, from my own time, this leaping game;
And I remember sitting in the dark
As now they sit,
By windows, before sleep,
Incredulous with themselves for failing
To accomplish impossible deeds.
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