263. Wondered Ways

Through stations of sleeping
the same as dreaming except for blindness and breathless
at certain stops
and a mouth dried to voiceless gumminess
through the single corridor if night
that might open into curtains filtering thinking out of daylight

Upon a pillowed milkiness and met
with men abrupt in their sweetness and swinging
through the versions of belief
they have supped on through the winter’s midriff,
waiting for a sign like lilting and lifting,
swift and shifted

Before bewitching breakwater barriers
and leaning into the surging surf and surfacing
athwart at the bow or beam of ship or house
awash beyond the furtherest beach
and wrinkling from the watery wrenching,
wait for the sight of it

Between the weight of sleep
and heaviness of life, the bland margarine of thinking
and the creaking of floorboards through the corridors
that do not lead but follow that diverted light
bursting from your eyes at the point
of waking, or of
seeing a cat do the same

Buttressed by conjunctions that stitch and direct
the articles of confession required by the merest movement
of hand or eye, and arranged in ravages
reserved for brambles and berry scent,
what conditioning would assuage
would do little to mend
the meaning of the measure you met

Cardinal as a virtue yet still
a bird was present far enough away to be a drop
of male blood and a voice that opened
a void into the creases of grey matter
and the tiny cavities of memory where
what you never wanted to know
remained remembered, remaindered,
but deep enough to equal forget
until

Pretty in the way of singing but a sight of it only,
and the tuxedos that march past
intermingling with a heard of llamas,
silent, yet each ready to name the form of dread
that lays a shadow for a path
they follow slowly up the mountain and out
of the range of your perception of morning
in the thin thin air of thinking

Dodgy and you cannot dodge it
so the image burns in, something not bound
to be forgotten, so free to burn, a sense of Sunday
as a time of sunlight unhindered by cloud or
a leaning away from the sun, the sin
of it being that it was deeper than evening
and you were still awake beside
the vendor of dreams and his ragtag collection of wares
he pushed through the night on two wheels

Whittled from water and
what would wander without hinder were
it not for ocean at the end of river or
the streams leading to river, the snakings
of water and to wash a hand would require
enough bending down to resemble supplication
toward the fall of baptism,
the dream you had of drowning

Calcified because calculated at the last point possible
and the disappearance,
something that leads by absence and avoidance,
yet the irreducible pressure of it
that comes from behind, like water, and pushes
not out but into
you or the shape you leave leaning
against the wall as a wet shadow,
well watered and being waited for to grow