December 10, 2013

• Beautiful Dreamer

  He is beyond the narrow valley – he has clawed his way into the dreamery
  But this deliberate and medicated journey is now flawed
  By the smoky drabness of this last fall day
  Before the silencing of snow overtakes and muffles his languor

  Wild things seem to fly at him from this bitter-leaden patch of sky
  Try as he might to sweep them away – still they come
  Hounding him into a sort of middle consciousness
  Not fully aware – not yet swollen with the rudeness of sleep

  He sees island spruce bending slightly waiting for inevitable ice
  Even though the scrubs of alders he struggles through
  Are burnished bright with death of leaf
  Their lovely tangled leaves on fire – their sugars spent

  He stumbles and is jabbed by lost branches of stiff birch
  He is in pain – he is bloodied by their vicious sharpness – he is hurt
  He must get help – but who on this massacred island is there for him?
  He is ravished by fear – no one will find him – there is no one to help

  He has lost his way – where is the middle path? – the one he must take
  To return to “life among the living” – so much of this tangled mass of moss
  Falling from above is stuffing up his mouth – he cannot breathe
  The wild things are crawling into him and biting his insides – he hurts

  He is on a gravel beach – He picks up a stone with a starfish frozen into it
  A billion years ago – and there are bloated bodies floating now
  Carved up by cruiser fire in the pacific straits – eyes eaten by crabs
  A totem washed out of an African grave glides on a wavelet toward him

  A huge cranberry wave roars up beyond the sea-moss laden ledges
  Seas fairy-colored by buoys – brilliant hues of yellow-greens and reds and oranges
  Detonate below him and carry him flying above the blood of bodies
  Seeping from smashed ships lining the bottom of seething Leyte Gulf

  He is in the forest again – its blackness blinds him – he cannot breathe
  On this rocky outcrop the ghosts of Sarah Bradford and her eight children
  Smother him with hugs and tender kisses – has he come to save them
  From the axes of rampaging savages? – they cling to him like sucker-fish

  The wilderness suddenly explodes – a great copper-beech crushes down on him
  Mud seeps into all his openings – he struggles to free himself from the mush
  Cormorants light on the copper’s branches and peck at him – why are they here?
  So far from the implacable sea – a harbor seal slithers toward him barking softly

  It smiles a toothy smile and sucks the smothering mud from out of him
  What is this animal doing in the middle of this violent tree-fall?
  Eyes open dully – comforted by blindingly brilliant sun filling his room
  Breath slows – he has survived yet again – to return to “life among the living”*

  (In the early 1600′s Abenaki Indians harassed by white settlers killed a
  white woman and her eight children who had fled to an island in Muscongus Bay. Maine
  *Marsden Hartley

  • 2:08 pm
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