Lucid Dreaming: a Book of Hours

One

in the morning--odd that this fulcrum rests
in the middle of darkness. Heliotrope, solar top,

the earth rolls us into the glare, out
of our duncecap shadow--by the numbers, not like

the cloud's slow wheel to rain, slurry,
river, ocean; nor even the men in their travels,

always returning. One sleeps behind the wall
and swims the white sheets that fold and twist

in the leftover light. Here on the dock, I have the water.
Or rather, what I have is its skin, that catches

red and green from the harbor lights,
and the waves that pass through it and leave it

whole, in their decorous physics,
and the hollow bass of the foghorn drilling me
clean of chatter. I think it must start
the octave of his sleep, pulling the neurons'

improvisations, the all-night REM fugue,
back to this tonic. That far, we are together, two,

and three, in the next house, and four,
five, in the bounty of counting.

And the Two Give Birth to the Myriad of Things
--said Lao-tse, sage of waterfalls, who

knew how the courtly heart keeps trying the world.
Heart wants only the good: dreams like a glass

harmonica, ringing light's measures. Love like art
if art could grow from seed, unfolding the code

inside it. But what the mind has sundered
cannot stay long uncluttered. Innocent heart, I

think, good heart, it wants, wants just now good
hands to coax my shoulders loose. What are we

birthing, when one thing leads to another,
two swimming the body's heat together?

If you want to know how the Way makes
a world, desire. But if you want to know the Way,

want nothing. A tall order, either way, worse
in the wanting not to want, as if desire can only

redshift like the galaxies who fly from us, who never
knew us. The distant water insists on falling inward,

to earth, to hell with all the stars retreating around us. O
Lao-tse, o Hubble, o love. It all comes down

to the ocean, in time, singing more deeply
the farther it travels. Its bass line thrums

the floorboards, the walls, such slow decay I can't
feel the dust on my skin until he is sleeping.

TRIPTYCH

i.

Three minutes,

no longer, in this cold ocean, you no longer feel
the margins of your body; contracted but whole,

your nerves reporting back from a shrinking perimeter,
you think you are swimming, homunculus,

but the limbs don't answer. The skin out there is gone,
that divided water from water.
~

Sleep

by the ocean's a double solvent.
The soul swims out of the body and joins

salt and the isolate tidal life of cells. Diatom,
rotifer, I was a colony. Now they are free.

~

The ocean breathes

like a big cat next to our bed. The dream it made
is gone. Body, be still, be safe. It's just

adrenalin's druggy buzz, a homemade panic
the nerves cook up in the dark, their boredom.


ii.
The sun on my skin where I met the world
all day, the light I read his face by, touch, the whole

of what I saw and did not see, now, at 3 a.m.
draws back to the marrow and burns. Who said

the conscious mind is like a flashlight? Whatever
it looks at is bright. This is a glowing universe, it thinks,

what's real is light. But the ocean I didn't attend to is in
my nerves, the stitch in my ankle partway up the cliff

trail, and Muzak and the riverrun of breathing,
all kindle in the cells.

His short laugh burns there, and the water's purr,
and our bodies loose to gravity.

I want to tell him, love, on this planet, we wake
on the beast's back, dream of its waking.

By morning, at breakfast, I will not remember,
and now he is sleeping.

iii.
Three minutes, one hundred-eighty seconds-- each
divisible as light, as shades in the the water,

so long, the blade of moonlight opens
a shallow trough into greens the eye

could study all night,
if the body could stay here.

Sparking and tacking in deeper blues,
the mind works its perfect doll of a swimmer.

FOUR
Eye travels out to the headland, black sphinx couchant
on the night's field; then over the harbor, horizon lit

from below by invisible Boston; finally rises, to Venus,
to Altair. Wherever I look in the beautiful box of space,

an effortless journey. The fourth dimension is time--
just try to see through it. Too late to sleep, says the peevish

clock in my brain. Sleeping, says body, deep in night's
furrow. It comes and it goes, says his breathing beside me.

Once I imagined Einstein's time as a track made of light
that the space-train followed,

going somewhere, the wake of its going
still bright behind us. Yes, I remember.

FIVE O FIVE
says the insect light of the digital clock,
and in the leaching dark I watch him sleep,

his eyes turned inward, his walk begun
down the nerve-lit alleys of his body.

I dream that he dreams a boy flying over
the ochre fields and the tumbled corpus

of foothills, both father and mother, the tangled
landscape of his making, lifting

now into wind-chipped mountains, outcrop and spire.
He starts, as at a rattlesnake, starts

noticing, starts listening
to the slow music the rocks tease out

from the tuned columns of air.
Art, we call it, the old

second person singularto be,
itsthou still intimate and absent.

Would it be better love
to stop dreaming him? In somnia. In gray exile,

better only to praise
his solitude where I cannot follow.

From there, airborne in sleep, the river
etches the valley with a branching tree. Its delta

is the sky, where the first green reaches when
the sun strikes. Its current returns him, rocks him to wake

in his breathing; landlocked in his
skin now, bone-bound at my side, he opens his eyes.

SIX OF ONE,

half a dozen of the almond biscotti, the cappuccino
steaming. Love demands good food and some small

crime against the sensible. It says this morning
we are not poor, this morning is a cul-de-sac

off the main drag. The sun rising burns the harbor
open, ignites the gulls to feeding; one long thin cry pierces

another; off-shore wind bends sound so sharply
it meets itself coming and going, tangle of sound and

blown-away ravel of night's knots into morning.
I tell him I stayed awake but not

that I spent those hours in orbit around his sleep like some
derelict planet, careening toward his dark side,

never catching up. From orbit we've seen the terminator
travel like rain on the prairie: wall of sunlight

whose top is lost in heaven,
whose clean hard edge advancing

ruffles no leaf and translates
being into being. What did you

dream? I ask, and he says
I was with him all night,

that he dreamed what was real,
all that I wanted to hear.

SEVEN

for luck, and for the seven heavens, transparently stacked
like an archaeological dig into glassworks; we say broad

daylight, but it's also deep. I want to find the stratum where
virtue is pure description: the virtue of mercury

is speed. The virtue of the soul is joy. Break a thermometer
and mercury, so rapid and silver it seems to ride on light,

shatters into mirrors of itself: identical beads, all whole,
all fleeing. The mind's virtue is difference; the heart's,

sameness--deeper than before, this resonance, this tide's
diastole and pulse. The body, in its obstinate formality,

plain under the blue vault endlessly lifting, heavy on the
warming sand--the body's virtue is renewal. Cell after cell

it loses all that it has, and still goes on,
faithful amnesiac lover of the sun,

the sun that says I have not left,
that says I have returned.

EASTPOINT
Without explaining how I came to stand here
counting the boats in the harbor and losing count

every time the tide changed, so that I could have
marked off each day by its lapse of attention;

without telling the Freudian, astrological, accidentally
fateful plots; without atoning for without retreating from

the tenderness spent on green leaves, white pages,
the absolute black of the alphabet--

so that the hours rested on stilts of words and the words
like the turtle who holds up the world, stood

on the currents of space, on nothing--
without warnings or forecasts;

I want to show you this beach, the violet
light cast up by the ocean,and something

that Einstein never saw: a space
that isn't married to time:

open water, without boats

briefly, until they come home.

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