In this dream the sea beats drunken time. Sleep slips round our limbs like oil. Your eyelashes touch my cheek. A purr, calm as narcosis. Spidersleep unwraps long arms to re-encircle, long legs sidereal and fluid as love made underwater. Iceblue words when wide awake. Scarlet, bathed on drowsy lips, separated voices meet again, wine decanted in a pearlsmooth bowl, or spilled, down steps of spotless tile. No roof but colorless sky and walls, trembling like storm-kissed glass.
Climbing off a steep stone terrace, descent made agile with fear of slipping. Unless you speak you are alone. You won’t know what you’re afraid of, until you turn round at the bottom. I’m vanishing and you don’t notice. What would you see? Look behind you now. A commonplace, a body like a falling star. Bright quiver, quickly gone.
The sea’s mad meter fades. The surf was only a ceiling fan after all. A cameo of smoke, of stain enclosing stain. And only wind, after all. It seems to matter, as the dream smudges out anew. A triplet of winking notes, an adagio of breeze and evaporating mist. You may choose not to turn but rather, step out lightly onto, into a meadow so green it has a painted look, rolled on in broad strokes.
The world’s curve is visible beyond its flow.
The softly-coppered gauze of your loose hair. A hum sills back from the painterly horizon. One tuneless hum among the hopeful many. Dreaming bear amid the angry bees.
Soft trick of sleep. To substitute a needle for the pricking pin. She turns back. You turn back. The meadow’s ocean blurs, as through a flea’s hungry focus, till I am worlds away, within this dream’s slowly unfolding catastrophe.
Fear’s eyes were always meadow’s green.
A hunter strokes his antlers in the forest’s sinister make-believe. Faint cries reach him. Cries of prance, and beware. The stagging eyes, too late the net above, the polished stakes, too late below. (Where did that jadeblown meadow go?)
Forest of stapled twigs and toybox critters. Shy porcelain hare, clay stoat, tinfoil sparrow, insulted away like smoke. Till back again, the meadow conquers every stretch of measurable space with its world of blue or green then white or blue fallen into shadow. The quietest leap of music into stillness. Wreckage charged with whispers. As though light pours through me.
Back to the dream I’m vanished from, and her (you) far into the kilometric offshore of a painting’s dolphinade detail. A hint is what I’m looking at, a trump of shadows revealing hidden light. Force of will leads one astray, into something more than orphan smoke. Isolation is the gift. The landscape of a chosen dream is yours to change. Light pours through you.
I’m the one who looks around, not you (now no longer stranger). Upon your quiet world, unbedeviled by the creep of mischief-making winds, the fanlike entrechat of disrespectful girls, less scoff than breeze. I would please you. I would be her incoherent slave. Dumb as coined boys at the jouvelike forest’s stylized edge: meadow wins, ocean loses. And as Calypso knows, it’s one and the same as of the enchanted now.
Closecaught in the net of the daydream, sun’s reflected light. Moving just beyond the dunes, the tips of the unmown weeds. Fox butt or flank reflecting red as it passes on my right and then
I’ve no excuse not to begin. The wayward breeze carries the words like pollen. A cluster of motes, like snapshot seaspray, too gentle to be mockery.
–Silence isn’t a choice?
Breath so fresh no sweetening air could lure away and yet a tongue like tiny fire.
A girl’s small footprints fill with the sea. Twin hollows scooped by the heels’ gingering pause. The delicate clusters of the stepping toes. A dozen skirls of foam, then wet sand and the sea, slipping away again. Rose and bluegray, the left-behind sacking of a jellyfish still breathes a drool of bubbles. Pinbright perforations measuring a tangled whip of seaweed, washed up for bedmate, companion for the long nights ahead.