In the eye of sleep,
brushing against some spelunker’s rope,
the mind comes undone
and stitches memories to dreams.
Who will imagine
that within the wriggling and miraculous
morning estuary of night’s visions,
hidden under the midden
heap and moraine of dreams,
there is a further mystery?
Our dreams are like bruises
on the surface of the pond of sleep,
cavities in the strata of self
where fugitive identities wander
through distant shoals of constellations.
Is the price of sleep,
while our souls crystallize into salt,
that we transform into carnal angels?
Lovers profit, unseen within the early dawn,
investing in somnambulant love,
like memories of gold bracelets
dazzled in the waking glow of tropical rain.
What is protected, what
mystery obeyed?
By day we wrestle
the mutant litters of our dreams,
stretching along meridians of hope and fear
that reach wanly into our lives,
while by night the dreams
we abandoned years ago
leave thin bones that smell of time,
hollow passages to dreams untold.
A palace of beasts in the twilight,
in uncertain darkness.
