WEAVERS

The Dreamer

When his mind is unfettered by cobwebs,
when night drifts into the pewtered shadows,
when the world is a cavern unlocking its secrets,
when his heart's tiny hammer slows its stammer,
when his body turns in its quarry to settle softly
like a pilgrim fallen into sleep's vast continent,
when the swivel door to the grave opens, then
he begins to hear a harpist in the flaxen fields,
and a dreamy delirium draws back the curtain.

Now he is famous for no one but the soul;
now he rehearses the descent of man, wherein
time no longer blackmails desire, and his blood
darkens like oil, and his lies are beyond repair.
Like an extinguished planet, he radiates exiled light,
while his father and mother, so long dead, unbind him
slowly and begin to pull his limbs from their stupor.

He's joined them in an alabaster city underground;
he hears their marrow talking aloud to his.

Is this the afterlife, he wonders, a cold temple
of doom, where there's nothing to feel but the love
of God: a great, shining tooth in an empty mouth?
But no, he sees through his shuttered eyelids:
the dove with its claws, the terrible torn gills
and gaping eye of the wailing fish, the blue bull
of oblivion – all premonitions of borrowed breath.
He is teetering on the edge of some threshold –
tongue-tied, he is becoming someone else –