117. Shadows Dreaming

Awakened eyelids disappear,
breaking sleep. It happens
every day. Certain considerations
apply, and certain tendencies
disappear in the face of your
momentum. Examine it to see.

Sunlight through the window,
the sunlight that wakes you
as it comes through the window,
isn’t sunlight, really, but
the thick muscled branches of
trees waving through the sunlight.

Alors, alors, en français, je crois,
dedans la langue de mes rêves,
où je ne suis pas un homme des mots,
ou où je suis la langue, la langue
de la bouche, l’homme de la voix,
dedans la boîte de l’imagination.

But there is no language to wake
you but the language of shadows
crossing the closed eyelids of your
face, and there are no tongues to
speak the language of your waking
besides your mother’s tongue

earwards towards you, in a small
whisper, like wind slipped in
under a door, not on a windy day
but on one when the wind is low
but steady through the trees, and
the branches sway against it.

I wish there were reasons for counting
besides the need to do it, the need
to know what number there is of
something, anything, even if that
number doesn’t tell you anything
you would ever need to know.

I wish there were reasons for waking
beyond the need to eat, for sustenance,
something beyond the bare uninformed
desire to continue, but as if in place, as
if frozen in place because the waking
doesn’t lead to that deeper awakening.

Night has slipped into morning now,
but early still, and I am still writing you
because I still have words to write,
something about the need for words to
make a living mean, something about
the fact of living to make a meaning

real, and we have spent the day
preparing for the wedding of our
daughter, now three weeks distant,
and wondering how much paint will
cover up how much of the unreasoned
past of this old leaning house of ours.

Someday soon, my daughter will wake
with the shadows grown long against
the profile of the sun, and she will
wonder what it was of the world that
made her want to wake, and she might
not even notice the skeletal shadows of

the trees at her window and she might
sleep a little longer, against the intentions
of the day, and wait until her body tells
her the day’s begun and she must up,
and so she will, weight against gravity,
feet against floor, until she is standing

on her feet, as you do in the morning, and
she is looking out the window, as you might,
and what she sees is not the world right
there, as it also is with you, but the world
that she might get to if she works towards
it, the world of dreams, of someplace else.