Drunk, I'd keep a lamp lit to find my sword,
The blare of horns sounded throughout the camp.
Soldiers ate meat under waving banners;
The military band played boisterous tunes.
Autumn brought our troops to the battlefield.
Carried by a charger at full gallop,
My bow thwipped, sending swift arrows flying.
We restored Imperial lands, boldly,
And won great fame for fighting gallantly,
But fame grows thin and gray just like my hair.
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
NOTE: This poem is also sometimes entitled, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.”
The dogs were in a wee hours war:
Growling and snapping and howling,
Breaching night's plutonian shore,
And sweet dreams those barks were fouling.
What monstrous dreamland incursions
That yapping must have brought about.
Bucolic scenes turned perversions
Of bared teeth and menacing snout.
Why fades a dream?
An iridescent ray
Flecked in between the tryst
Of night and day.
Why fades a dream? --
Of consciousness the shade
Wrought out by lack of light and made
Upon life's stream.
Why fades a dream?
That thought may thrive,
So fades the fleshless dream;
Lest men should learn to trust
The things that seem.
So fades a dream,
That living thought may grow
And like a waxing star-beam glow
Upon life's stream --
So fades a dream.
I don't remember my dreams --
not in the middle of the night
and not in the morning.
But, sometimes, I catch a glimpse
at a random instant:
composing a poem,
reflecting on a passage
from a book,
eating a cracker...
But my dreams are like
frightened animals,
turning my attention
directly upon them,
makes them skitter off...,
vanishing into the thicket.
My dreams vanish like they
were never really there,
and I am left wondering
just what I saw.
The harder I try to remember,
the more severely I scrub
my mental hard drive,
purging all shapes and motions,
until my recollection is nothing
but a vague residue of feeling.
I don't KNOW that it was a dream.
I couldn't swear to it.
All I know is that it's an image
that I can't tie to my waking life,
can't tie to any person, place,
or thing I know to be real.
(And, often enough, it's an image
that couldn't exist in the real world.)
I couldn't remember it as a dream,
but - somehow - I intensely FEEL
that it was a dream,
but the Dream is deep down in its hole,
shaking like a critter that
was almost snatched up by
a monster too awful to
contemplate....
and, somehow, I am that monster.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and tower were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reach'd the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from afar
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she play'd,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me,
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
When I was a child,
for a time,
the bridge was out.
They were replacing the rusty
iron trestle bridge
with a thick-slab concrete
monstrosity.
I could go down to the river,
and I could see the
scarred and marred
construction site,
& the big yellow machines
that sat dormant on the weekends.
But one couldn't cross the river --
not unless one was willing to get wet,
and was a better swimmer than I
(and it was autumn & the water cold.)
It was a strong current that swept
along between two steep banks.
It was not a great distance,
nor were they violent waters.
But that brown water moved with
such smooth swiftness.
I dream about the time the bridge was out,
now & again,
and wonder what it was
about those weeks
that still has meaning to my mind.
There was a retiree named Graham who dreamt he was unprepared for an exam. "What a dream, you fool! You're sixty years out of school, and still have an impulse to cram!"
Was it a lifetime ago, or was it a dream? I remember it being a long drive to a cold shore. And I sat alone on that shore, and I sought a shark -- not out in the waters, but within myself. Finding nothing, I felt the thing to do was to rattle in rhythm with the twisted hustle of pounding waves, and I awoke, shivering under piercing points of light that somehow felt cold, & made me feel cold - deep inside.
I'm dripping into midnight -- my world has disappeared. My eyes crack to light and life, but I forgot to hear -- remembering, the silence is broken & I hear a rhythmic clack. But I can't help but wonder, where it is that I'm at? I'm at the bottom of a wooden staircase, too steep to be sound, looking up until perspective makes the case vanishingly thin. Should I climb the staircase? What else can I do? Will I wake half way up, and find myself in the blue? The laws of dreams force my hand, I can't stand paralyzed, and I'm halfway to infinity by means that I know not. And I'm thinking of the line from that children's prayer: "If I should die before I 'wake," and I think: "What the hell is wrong with parents?" that's the thought upon which you're going to leave with your child to "go to sleep?" And you're wondering why the kid is up all night? Because dying in one's sleep doesn't start to seem like a fine prospect until one is an octogenarian. And so I sleep...
Tiger Riding for Beginners 