Collected Poems (35 page)

Heart, ever unworthy of you, lost in you, will I ever truly dream you, or dream beyond you?

Room

I wanted to take up room. What a strange dream! I wanted to take up as much room as I could,

to swell up, enlarge, crowd into a corner all the others in the dream with me, but why?

Something to do with love, it felt like, but what love needs more volume than it has?

Lust, then: its limitlessness, the lure of its ineluctable renewal — but this came before lust.

Fear? Yes, the others were always more real than I was, more concrete, emphatic: why not fear?

Though I knew that this was my dream, they were the given and I the eccentric, wobbling variable.

A dubious plasma, drifting among them, self-consciously sidling, flowing, ebbing among them,

no wonder my atoms would boil, trying to gel, and no wonder I’d sometimes resent them,

brood on them, trying to understand what they were, what my connection to them really was.

Sometimes I’d think the point of the dream was to find what of me was embodied in them.

What I was with them, though, what they finally were in themselves, I hardly could tell.

Sometimes they seemed beasts; I could see them only as beasts, captives of hunger and fear.

Sometimes they were angels, nearly on fire, embracing, gleaming with grace, gratitude, praise.

But when their lips touched, were they kissing, or gnawing the warmth from a maw?

So much threatening pain to each other, so much pain accomplished: no surprise I’d think beasts.

But still, I loved them; I wasn’t just jealous of them, I loved them, was of them, and, more,

I’d grown somehow to know in the dream that part of my love meant accounting for them.

Account for them: how, though, why? Did they account for each other, would they for me?

That wasn’t what the dream meant to be now; I loved them, I wasn’t to ask if they loved me.

The fear, the loving and being loved, the accounting for and the wish to had all become one.

Dream, where have you brought me? What a strange dream! Who would have thought to be here?

Beasts, angels, taking up room, the ways of duty and love: what next, dream, where now?

History

I have escaped in the dream; I was in danger, at peril, at immediate, furious, frightening risk,

but I deftly evaded the risk, eluded the danger, I conned peril to think I’d gone that way,

then I went this, then this way again, over the bridges of innocence, into the haven of sorrow.

I was so shrewd in my moment of risk, so cool: I was as guileful as though I were guilty,

sly, devious, cunning, though I’d done nothing in truth but be who I was where I was

when the dream conceived me as a threat I wasn’t, possessed of a power I’d never had,

though I had found enough strength to flee and the guileful wherewithal to elude and be free.

I have escaped and survived, but as soon as I think it, it starts again, I’m hounded again:

no innocence now, no unlikeliest way, only this frenzied combing of the countries of mind

where I always believed I’d find safety and solace but where now are confusion and fear

and a turmoil so total that all I have known or might know drags me with it towards chaos.

That, in this space I inhabit, something fearsome is happening, headlong, with an awful momentum,

is never in doubt, but that’s all I can say — no way even to be sure if I’m victim or oppressor;

absurd after all this not to know if I’m subject or object, scapegoat, perpetrator, or prey.

The dream is of beings like me, assembled, surrounded, herded like creatures, driven, undone.

And beings like me, not more like me but like me, assemble and herd them, us; undo us.

No escape now, no survival: captured, subjugated, undone, we all move through dreams of negation.

Subject, object, dream doesn’t care; accumulate or subtract, self as solace, self-blame.

Thou shalt, thou shalt not; thus do I, thus I do not: dream is indifferent, bemused, abstracted.

Formulation, abstraction; assembly, removal: the dream detached; exaltation, execration, denial.

The Gap

So often and with such cruel fascination I have dreamed the implacable void that contains dream.

The space there, the silence, the scrawl of trajectories tracked, traced, and let go;

the speck of matter in non-matter; sphere, swing, the puff of agglutinate loose-woven tissue;

the endless pull of absence on self, the sad molecule of the self in its chunk of duration;

the desolate grain, flake, fragment of mind that thinks when the mind thinks it’s thinking.

So often, too, with equal absorption, I have dreamed the end of it all: mind, matter, void.

I’m appalled, but I do it again, I dream it again, it comes uncalled for but it comes, always,

rising perhaps out of the fearful demands consciousness makes for linkage, coherence, congruence,

connection to something beyond, even if dread: mystery exponentially functioned to dread.

Again, premonitions of silence, the swoop through a gulf that might be inherent in mind

as though mind bore in its matter its own end and the annulment of everything else.

Somehow I always return in the dream from the end, from the meaningless, the mesh of despair,

but what if I don’t once, what if the corrections fail once and I can’t recover the thread

that leads back from that night beyond night that absorbs night as night absorbs innocent day?

The whole of being untempered by self, the great selves beyond self all wholly wound out;

sense neutered, knowledge betrayed: what if this is the real end of dream, facing the darkness

and subjecting the self yet again to imperious laws of doubt and denial which are never repealed?

How much can I do this, how often rejuvenate and redeem with such partial, imperfect belief?

So often, by something like faith, I’m brought back in the dream; but this, too; so often this, too.

The Knot

Deciphering and encoding, to translate, fabricate, revise; the abstract star, the real star;

crossing over boundaries we’d never known were there until we found ourselves beyond them.

A fascination first: this was why the dream existed, so our definitions would be realized.

Then more than fascination as we grasped how dream could infiltrate the mundane with its radiance.

There’d be no mundane anymore: wholly given to the dream, our debilitating skepticisms overcome,

we’d act, or would be acted on — the difference, if there’d been one, would have been annulled —

with such purity of motive and such temperate desire that outcome would result from inspiration

with the same illumination that the notion of creation brings when it first comes upon us.

No question now of fabricating less ambiguous futures, no trying to recast recalcitrant beginnings.

It would be another empire of determination, in which all movement would be movement towards —

mergings, joinings — and in which existence would be generated from the qualities of our volition:

intention flowing outwards into form and back into itself in intricate threadings and weavings,

intuitions shaped as logically as crystal forms in rock, a linkage at the incandescent core,

knots of purpose we would touch into as surely as we touch the rippling lattice of a song.

No working out of what we used to call identity; our consummations would consist of acts,

of participating in a consciousness that wouldn’t need, because it grew from such pure need,

acknowledgment or subject: we’d be held in it, always knowing there were truths beyond it.

Cleansed even of our appetite for bliss, we’d only want to know the ground of our new wonder,

and we wouldn’t be surprised to find that it survived where we’d known it had to all along,

in all for which we’d blamed ourselves, repented and corrected, and never for a moment understood.

The Fear

In my dream of unspecific anxiety, nothing is what it should be, nothing acts as it should;

everything shifts, shudders, won’t hold still long enough for me to name or constrain it.

The fear comes with no premonition, no flicker in the daily surges and currents of dream.

Momentums, inertias, then logic distends, distorts, bends in convulsive postures of scorn.

All I hold dear rushes away in magnetic repulsion to me, ravaged as though by a storm,

but I know that I myself am the storm, I am the force that daunts, threatens, rages, repels.

I am like time, I gather the things of creation and drive them out from me towards an abyss.

All I call beauty is ravaged, transcendence hauled back in a gust to corporeal swarm.

I never believe that the part of me which is fear can raze all the rest with such fury,

even the flesh is depleted, forsaken; I’m no longer spirit or flesh but lost within both,

negated, forlorn, a thing the dream can capture and propel through itself any way it desires.

Nothing to hope for now but more concrete fears that at least might reveal their reason.

Nothing to dream but silence and forgetting; everything failing, even the wanting to be.

You

Such longing, such urging, such warmth towards, such force towards, so much ardor and desire;

to touch, touch into, hold, hold against, to feel, feel against and long towards again,

as though the longing, urge and warmth were ends in themselves, the increase of themselves,

the force towards, the ardor and desire, focused, increased, the incarnation of themselves.

All this in the body of dream, all in the substance of dream; allure, attraction and need,

the force so consumed and rapt in its need that dream might have evolved it from itself,

except the ardor urges always towards the other, towards you, and without you it decays,

becomes vestige, reflex, the defensive attempt to surmount instinctual qualms and misgivings.

No qualms now, no misgivings; no hesitancy or qualifications in longing towards you;

no frightened wish to evolve ideals to usurp qualm, fear or misgiving, not any longer.

The longing towards you sure now, ungeneralized, certain, the urge now towards you in yourself,

your own form of nearness, the surface of desire multiplied in the need that urges from you,

your longing, your urging, the force and the warmth from you, the sure ardor blazing in you.

To Listen

In the dream of death where I listen, the voices of the dream keep diminishing, fading away.

The dead are speaking, my dead are speaking, what they say seems urgent, to me, to themselves,

but as I try to capture more clearly what I heard just moments ago, the voices ebb and it’s lost;

what’s more, my impatience to know what was said seems to drive it further out of my ken.

In the dream of death where I listen, I keep thinking my dead have a message for me:

maybe they’ll tell me at last why they must always die in the dream, live, die, die again.

I still can’t hear what they say, though; I force my senses into the silence but nothing is there.

Sometimes I listen so hard I think what I’m waiting to hear must already have been spoken,

it’s here, its echo surrounds me, I just have to learn to bring it more clearly within me

and I’ll know at last what I never thought I would know about death and the dead and the speech

of affection the dead speak that stays on in the sentient space between living and after.

For the dead speak from affection, dream says, there’s kindness in the voices of the dead.

I listen again, but I still hear only fragments of the elaborate discourse the dead speak;

when I try to capture its gist more is effaced, there are only faded words strewn on the page

of my soul that won’t rest from its need to have what it thinks it can have from the dead.

Something is in me like greed now, I can’t stop trying to tear the silence away from the voices,

I tear at the actual voices, though I know what the dead bring us is not to be held,

that the wanting to hold it is just what condemns dream to this pained, futile listening,

is what brings dream finally to its end, in silence, in want, in believing it’s lost,

only for now, my dream thinks, at least let it be only for now, my forsaken dream thinks,

what the dead brought, what the dead found in their kind, blurred, weary voices to bring.

The Covenant

In my unlikeliest dream, my dead are with me again, companions again, in an ordinary way;

nothing of major moment to accomplish, no stains to cleanse, no oaths or debts to redeem:

my dead are serene, composed, as though they’d known all along how this would be.

Only I look aslant, only I brood and fret, marvel; only I have to know what this miracle is:

I’m awed, I want to embrace my newly found dead, to ask why they had to leave me so abruptly.

In truth, I think, I want pity from them, for my being bereft, for my grief and my pain.

But my dead will have none of my sorrow, of my asking how they came to be here again.

They anoint me with their mild regard and evidence only the need to continue, go on

in a dream that’s almost like life in how only the plainest pastimes of love accumulate worth.

Cured of all but their presence, they seem only to want me to grasp their new way of being.

At first I feel nothing, then to my wonder and perhaps, too, the wonder of the dead,

I sense an absence in them, of will, of anything like will, as though will in the soul

had for the dead been all given over, transfigured, to humility, resignation, submission.

I know without knowing how that the dead can remember the movements of will, thought willing,

the gaze fixed at a distance that doesn’t exist, the mind in its endless war with itself —