A Collection of Dreams II

Note. I’ve had a lot of requests for more of these tiny extracts. I think I’ll cast some together every once and a while.

1.
There are paintings too somber to finish set about falling furniture. Bottles of wine, the scent of tea and a taste of Tchaikovsky. Flowers alive and flowers no longer, weeping across the space between windows. A consistency that makes memory subordinate. Letters opened, unopened and tied across liberal twine above half attended replies. More matches than candles, more candles than clocks - the lone clock is stuck, indefinitely, one might suppose it has been for some time but then how would we know. The place while occupied is empty and wholly full and all at the same time.

2.
The light between the window and the room where the air has both lost and ascertained something anew. As a child, I’d sit there with the garden far below. About the winter flowers, a wren danced too and fro in all the places I would later walk, arm in arm with the memory of you. Perhaps the window is still there, watching, against the mist and rain breaking each the words I’d hope to say. There’s a grain across that time I still can’t quite escape. Some part of me I’ve left between the window and the room. I wonder if your ghost is happy there, singing sweetly midst the flowers.

3.
A small child in a white dress, dancing through a graveyard, looking for old friends.

4.
I think I’d like to die somewhere the language is not my own, where the moment fades to quiet, almost wholly unknown. I’ve tired of walking where by a single glance one might know a face - I’ve lingered there quite long enough. It’s time I fled and left no trace.
I think I’d like to die somewhere the lakes live without brace, their edges broad, their silver hopes solely left untamed. There one might converse with the western wind in that loose tongued nostalgic way that’s woven through a summer memory.
I think I’d like to die somewhere the sun falls fleet through rain; when the words are gone and language fades I think I’ll slip into the loam and from the world escape.

5.
How nimbly you have stolen me
through the Thrush grieved morn.
The season’s scent of golden leaf
hath to my marrow torn.
In the falling garden’s steeple,
all grief is made forlorn,
your marble eye sheds dawn-lit tears,
each twisting rose’s thorn.
-
Though your memory we’ve so enshrined
in the darkest corner hides -
The brambles claw unto the path
that once to you did guide.
Your rose’d courtiers ebb wildly,
sharpening their dewy teeth.
They’ve not forgotten the lady
who we’d thrown to the oblique.
-
The dreams of early morning creep
to my unsettled sleep.
Enlisting a somber memory -
secrets buried at your feet.
How hopelessly we’d fled from thee,
the lone shepherd’s lost sheep.
How nimbly you have stolen me
there’s no time left to weep.