Midnight and History

The Lovers Image of Sleep

Know fear will crowd your night with flying horses

While old profound and unforgotten rodents

Gnaw the prop amnesias through to dreams.

Here they return: the baffled child's extremes-

Pegasus and pariah, the latent credence

That haunts the world's great sleep with frail remorses.

All night all night their wings possessed the dark.

I reached in a futile for your cool and calm-

O we were laid together in one dream!

A comrade pronounced the system vile and stark-

A reverend read the twenty second psalm.

Dialectic Jesus rode the beam,

Quoting the scriptures of Freud with some alarm

Until the headlines shrieked us past all harm.

Recurrent

He dreamed all night of swinging on a gate

Over a pit of circling rats, of clinging

Wordless with null horror. Swinging swinging

Into the doom alarms anticipate.

Morning and mouthwash. Shaving-mirrored. Waking.

The prattling sub-brain unaloudly rambles,

Reflecting how coffee drugs and egg unscrambles

A dreamscape into headlines, subway-shaking,

Nine o'clock is a color of the sun

That stretches its beams languid into noon

Like hands in automats that ply a spoon

Toward fluorescent evening, working done.

Returning with stiff crowds, retiring late,

He dreamed all night of swinging on a gate.

And That State Which Is Neither

See how the familiar strange returns

With half a name to tease that cell, awake

Between idea and urge, which shivers and burns...

There are no concessions that it will not make.

One lone diurnal fraction sobbing yes-

Imploring the shrill cock of consciousness.

But adamant, my symbol-shape sustained

Beyond experimental pinch and cry.

"That conscious mote is your childhood!" it explained,

And pointed to the sudden distant sky

Where like fantastic fruit, immense and bright,

Stars dropped into the autumn of the night.

I turned, myself plummeted, fell with a scream-

Out of the garish day and into dream.