The Bamberger Reiter

In the night there came to her the great

muscular smooth god who stroked her flesh,

patient, unimportunate, with broad

gold fingertips. Testing her faith,

he hung above her complicated life,

gave tasks, appointed quests, and started plots

involving things he gave her, those talismanic

sudden properties: thumb rings dark with garnets,

bowels (which the god can see), gypsy

food, poverty, carouse of siblings

(yes, and offspring) on the smoky stairs,

back stoop stones creviced with New Orleans

moss, betrayal in shadow, candelabra.

His brow and eye were hooped with actor's carbon,

in some faces. Then, for her reward,

when he had stopped confusing her, in tawdry

urban terrifying plots, with someone

else whom she was not and did not want

to be, he came round, a rural lover

swinging on a post, or sailing like

cherubic figures deep into the nave,

pure in face, dusty, incensed, rose;

whispered her from far or startled her

nearby with lucid look and round damp hips

globing her casual touch, in holy places.

Abruptly, he was sunken and remote,

wit or wraith or involuted mind

making poetry, a grizzled boy

to whom she but bequeaths introductory

sentences in several turgid versions

none of which is right. Her armpits flow.

The small grimacing god leaps from font

to pew, chiding, rueful, noncommittal.

These dreams are meant to be embarrassing,

abound in failures in the very face of stone,

accuse by chime, refuse by water to reflect

what she is or expects. These dreams . . . are like this one,

she thinks: nasty with interludes as characters shift,

gods shrivel, and, after it all, we are usual.

But now, out of nothing proven, deserved, or won,

he comes to her in the form of a dusky arch,

bent bow, silky span; as fillet

fading into curl, curls into rubied

crown, as hand upon an ancient pommel

primed for war, he comes, things on his mind,

and, flourishing his horse on the epistle

side, allows her to mount pluming up.

In this dream's breach of fading space, the knight

sat a horse which melts into a woman,

the woman rode a world which, lastly, rhymed,

the fiery god spoke, "Yes. You." and she'd come through.