The Magic Sleep and the Memory of Waking

I

It is a tree of many rivers.

The slow, nearly frozen flow

goes on arranged over sky-white stones.

We did not tell each other

how it would go on. We watched

the Arno circling below and you said,

"Flowers are the shadows of stars."

I

The guardian stands where we must sleep,

but what does he stand for unless

we speak? He has reached for what cannot move:

the moment of air breathed and the canopy

of light. We saw that as flowers, or we saw

white flowers as a grouping of sunlight that moved.

And his voice moves with the bright surface

of breathing as from a calyx until it is unfolded.

Then. I do not like to stand still while I fall

asleep. So I say that I must sleep and then

I walk to you as I might enter my own flesh.

m

Allthat we wanted and repent ofthat day wasan approach

to describe sunlight on the plain, flat

as a circular chamber's floor, its sides the sweep

of wooded hills, closely foliaged, but the place

was without need of foliage. You would know that,

and the sunlight also curved and formed the walls

we still imagine. If it had been you

led there that day what could you have done?

We as such are incidental, or walking reports,

nearly sleepwalkers in understanding paths

and what forms them. Hadrian's villa retreats.

No one questions the inevitableness of a path.

One day while we slept we set foot onto this path.

A child could not enter that doorway,

although he had learned the use of his arms

there was an explanation required, devious

is he who follows the track of the Anio, or the smoke

that stood above the Campagna di Roma.

The child resembled those statues that offer us a gift,

we believe, since they are armless, they are in dreams.

I noticed how the plains imprison sunlight.

IV

Leaves gathered in the curve of relaxed hands.

When will we be without need again?

Need of sleep and need of death. We turned

and the garden which is a desert surprised us.

We fed the swans grass and then we wandered off

from their groaned excitement. A dog guided us.

And here the emperor wandered: the skull of light.

We walk on the thin plain without bodies.

Iam afraid to speak because I will not wake.

The Lord stands where I learned I was asleep.

Each night we have raised our right arm and what is left

steadies the table and the dust in the dismal garden.

The swans separate the grass from the pond's water.

Grass floats before them like islands of green sunlight.

Their beaks clack like alien typewriters.

Later, the dog brings us a living bird. We imagine

the daughter brings us the darkness of water.

The statues have harmed us, once they stood with arms

and stared down in to the pond, now freed of their arms

they embody the torso's thrust upwards and without

eyes

they also observe us. Our breath holds within the dog,

the sunlight, and the groaned excitement we forge

and which he ignores while living on the moon's dark

side.

v

Through a darkness or a falling of darkness

as if that took place watching the wind drop

through trees as along sheaves of darkness

and the wavering of pine cones and a glisten

of white at the jointures steadied now.

Birds calling as from another place, the voice

of a woman who cannot be here but steadied . . .

How familiar it all is and remembered still

as any considered breath, or flame for these fires

are silent. We proceeded along the quiet lawn

where the pink rabbit turned tan or grey

or we turned. We are meeting ourselves again

under a gaze that collects walls of firs

at darkened corners and at times stands haloed

with raised arms

(those statues you spoke of offering gifts:

they stood on their toes in rows as if the groin of the

pool.

They mimic the man or woman who lifts their voice to

say:

We have been anxious amidst praise. We have been

but as through a darkness steadied now. The trees, cones,

wind,

the bird call beyond the flame viewed as a falling).

VI

Asleep, I fell asleep and was within a dream

and walked upwards on a flight of stairs

to follow the others. They were like echoes

of people. The stairwell was stone, each slab

was known as located within the church tower,

that place suggestive of what encircles life.

I knew that it would soon be dark and that

I had never seen the sun in the sky in a dream.

On the roof I watched the patches of cloud

and the clear sky while I was turning

until I recalled and saw the sun inside me.