Woke up, it was snowing --
wrote it was raining in the notebook:

it rained, it snowed,
I shut a window

with an impotence
of trying to close another’s eye,

overlooking
and overlooked.

Sin and Sleep share that messianic affliction to time in that I never know how much dead weight I am accumulating: the former in pages of God’s book, the latter in the scrolls of history. But if one can sleep a sin off, maybe the dream can occupy that threshold between having read and having written.

Embraces

The original impression endures,
from where the world discloses itself --

apologetically, more than was asked for,
the screen glowed with a perilous vision.

We could not see a difference in texture,
description or regret, it did not matter.

One went further until one could go no longer:
the ruined house just the same as you left it.

Still, we struggled to keep the water over our heads,
till this dreamy material wore itself thin.

To those with anything to lose it was a reassurance;
we went towards our wet tents to sleep.

Living in a city perennially alarmed.

Had he known that his adventurous turn
too suddenly away from home
would tantalize him with the image of a life

perpetually lost, then he might have saw,
or in that same dream, reawakened, finally see,
unlike one acquitted by sleep, a picture

of the world without him -- better there
and friendlier the frailties, though nullifying:
what remains of criminals barely forgiven

but a guilt more guilty of than the thirst itself --
a paradise for poor men, consumed
of themselves devotedly as fruit.

The New World

His look, her sigh held strange acquaintance with finality, when, pausing again to articulate the problem, their resignation, appearing to outlast the flesh itself, saw the founding rock become the sharpener: what left was there for maxims to identify, but rubble, its nameless sacrifice for the future -- what dark exactness of feeling,
extracted from a book, was to be found here, with quiet reverence, for the stricken house left behind?