There's an odd melancholy that runs through my dreams
and colors, sounds, and textures most of them.
It's the only thing that some of them leave behind.
It's like that weight, that heft described by Emily
that oppresses on sullen afternoons
when the day's best expectations have all run out
and we've found nothing better to do beyond them
but fidget and sigh for tomorrow's list...
or otherwise discover herein our freedom
from the exigency of having things to do
and then make of our evening something else,
something that confounds best and worst expectations
or satisfies newer ones that were never planned.
But dreams produce another kind of heft -
a heft that cannot be compromised or sullied
either by dropping our bags, kicking off our shoes
and clucking, "What the hell, I just don't care!"
or by chalking it up, like Chaucer's Pertelote,
to indigestion or the Oedipus Complex.
For it'll return again and again
in the upcoming picture windows that sequence
the tenebrous experience marking our sleep,
accompanying it like a sibling
that perished before we were even told its name,
though something in it decided to stick around
as a reminder we'd rather ignore
that we will never bring ourselves to completion,
as the lives represented in each of our dreams
were drawn from multitudes of other spheres
to whir by us briskly for our non-approval
like cadences from fragmented cathedral tunes,
suggesting that we consider in them
our samenesses in concurrent or former lives.
[Previous: Fixed Fire (or, My Leonine Tao)]
[Next: Some Sentences]