Five Dreams

1. Ankher and the Ladder

    "Please come in Mrs. Ankher
will be happy to meet you."
Inside the floor is large-checkered blue
and red and sinks to crater-dimples.
Old Ankher's twin heads are mute-
she sits on a bench at the left wall of the room.
It's dusk and the house is beautiful,
but at some perhaps-price, it is falling-
the east wall is raised by chains
and the acrylic floor slants hard to the ocean.
Children pass through the rooms in slow blurs
and my guide is calling to them.
They go on in circular motion, sliding down
the slick, thick, color-checkered floor
like a spectrum of pawns on a wilting chessboard.
Some do not run out from the water
    to complete their circuit.

I descend to the shore with my guide
and we do not talk of a number of vague portents.

    Later it is late and I sit on the same bench
in a different house at a different wall.
Some crowd the bench with me, some I know, all
having arms and necks and some peep out
from below the bench where the legs would be
one whom I know narrows eyes at me from the bench leg
and I am suddenly at a great height on a slanted ladder
    whose steps then collapse flat.

2. A Bobst-Diver

The Kingfisher mounts his perch and dives
from the top floor of the Bobst library, No-Houston New York,
toward a three-D illusory Escher ocean floor.
He could imagine his vertebrae would divide;
separate to separate continents under these marble cubes,
to donate mangled wings to the university.
He passes the stages of youths of alternate lives
(in some he lives and others, dies:
                                            entering the whirlpool)-
distracted, he has lost his winging at a crucial moment-

Gentiles and Jews passing through the turnstiles.
One cries out in surprise to see a sea-bird
rushing down to pluck a live fish right from his hands.

3. Tom, Ghana, and the Guard

A large lecture hall, nearly empty.
The professor speaks in mumbled gibberish as
the door opens at the hand of Tom Eliot.
He mounts the stair coming to sit
at the chair in front of me.
His head is grown bald and
on it is tattooed some four lines in Greek
(perhaps those of the Sibyl in a jar)
and a horizontal arrow,
crossed diagonally with another.
"Do you know of Ghana?" turning, he asks.
"It's in Africa."
"Some very interesting things there."

Some time has passed as I walk to my apartment.
A fellow in a gas mask stands guard outside;
I greet him and he removes his apparatus.
His eyes are circles of black void
that contract like the aperture of a lens.

4. Wires, Milk, Figure, Flood

I am weaving a length of fishing line
Through, that is, around my fingers
And under the cap of a glass soda bottle

A friend sits next to me
A girl, blue eyeing, across:
"This milk is already ruined."
"Already?
It's just fit itself into the glass."
"I don't think I'll drink it."
"That's because it's ruined."

Fishing wire under the cap;
My friend excuses himself.
The waiter sets down a flotilla
of jams and preserves,
"well look, maple, blond
blueberry, dark marmalade."

...

A figure is silhouetted, suspended,
floats in a dark ceiling alcove
behind a curtain threaded through
glass blue beads.

A strand is loosened, waves,
falls as is seen from above
onto the side of the body, passes through
the nude abdomen of the outlined figure
painlessly.

...

An outsize kitchen of dark granite and tiles, long
tall windows set into the wall without break
are a gallery onto the sea outside.
In the space of a moment
it rolls in, delicate against the glass.
We stand calm, in a row.
Backbones of fantastic creatures
slide out of the slack flood.

The sky thickens heavier with water,
falls clotting the swell purple.
Humongous jaws tear at necks and spines.
At once the whole of them rise bolt upright
and wobble like saws or storm flags.

5. White Room

An interior white space of indeterminate size. A blond-haired
girl in a white dress stands facing the mind's eye at a fair distance,
holding something delicately in two hands. She's told to walk
through by a distant, unheard voice. The girl looks behind her,

'I always walk through and it always gets wet,'

turns again and, seeing from the back now, she walks
forward, carrying an object, small and knotty with penitence.
Seen from the back her figure slows and her hair floats, then
(seeing from the ceiling) turns to four ruddy, groomed dogs
come to the threshold and gaze to her with still bodies.