A Poet Reflects

The dream, the lure, is the prayer’s answer,
which can’t be plotted on any chart—
     as we know the world that’s coming together
     without our knowing is falling apart.

—Peter Cole, closing lines to “Song of the Shattering Vessels,” from Poetry (v. CCII, no. 2, May 2013)

fluttering-slips:

To Awaken with Her

To awaken with her, this dream
to begin days, days full and ripe
whose mornings already pour gold
just like this one, this, on which I dream,
and say to the gold in my window,
I finally understand you, when she lies by me
when I hold her, her breath
when my hands are once more sure
of what they must curve to hold,
to hold her form in the mornings, early,
when the days bear her soft name,
this gold reaches its goal.
I’d like to dream, dream for years,
study the alchemy of morning light,
and on those days that are fully ours,
not to awaken empty-handed.

Uwe Kolbe

“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.”

—Emile M. Cioran

hsaptus:

“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”

―Jean Genet

A bird calls me
From a dark tree
In my dream.

Calls me from the pink twig of daylight,
From the long shadow
That grows each day closer to my heart.

—Charles Simic, opening lines to “The Bird,” from Selected Poems 1963-1983: Revised and Expanded (George Braziller, 1990)

“You don’t dream about angles and surfaces and so on. You dream about women, bread, smokes and trees.”

—Jean Hélion 

“If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up.  It was so simple it must be true.  You died, the dream was over, you woke up.  That’s what people meant when they talked about going to heaven.  It was like waking up.” 

—Ian McEwan, from The Daydreamer (HarperCollins, 1994)

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

—Wendell Berry, section 1 of “The Country of Marriage” from The Country of Marriage (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973)