Dream Cargo

Mid-morning, mid-life, freighted

                                still from a night’s dreaming,

sunrise done, pageant gone,

                                careening now toward noon and glare,

disheveled and defiled . . .

                                a good time to say what lies ahead:

after dustfall and the body’s decrescendo,

                                after the maple’s first gleam goes flat,

there’s a burnish to Autumn

                                you learn to live for: oblivion’s

pocket runs deep in our lives,

the charnel crows fly overhead.

Maybe it’s Troy we ought to think of here,

                                and the blood-cost of beauty,

the old destiny of passion and war,

and the windowless eyes of the ravaged.

Ever notice how slip-shod smoke is,

                                drifting, homeless, how it just curls and vanishes?

So now think of souls in flight,

                                smoke-drift, migration, a flock

of two, you and me down the road.

                                Lord, how we proliferate

and fade away; Lord, how piecemeal we die.

This is nowhere near the whole truth.

                                There’s another kind of dying we survive

to become a carapace,

                                a reliquary,

and one you know all too well: I saw it,

your eye’s fear-flash, felt the weight

                                of the air and crush of wings

everywhere as you told me

                                your ancient story and how it

plunders you still and drops you dawn-

                                cold in bed, night in and night out.

You did not dream this story,

                                though like a dream, it lingers

long after it found you, this ravaging

from that famous old Greek myth.

And still the truck in my dream rolled on down

                                the road, hauling its dream cargo,

you and me, side by side, heather

and gorse, blossom and bruise on the lam.

Could it be dreaming’s all that’s left of prayer?

                                May our dreams then proliferate,

and drift away where we cannot

                                get at them, and savage them.

May they drift upward without us,

                                you and I, soul’s husks, hunkered down

here on this blue orphan earth, for better

or worse, our sapphire in the star-field.