It is the time when crimson stars
     Weary of heaven’s cold delight,
And take, like petals from a rose,
     Their soft and hesitating flight
Upon the cool wings of the air
     Across the purple night.

It is the time when silver sails
     Go drifting down the violet sea,
And every poppy’s crimson mouth
     Kisses to sleep a lovesick bee;
The fireweed waves her rosy plumes
     On pasture, hill and lea.

It is the time to dream—and feel
     The lanquid rocking of a boat,
The pushing ripple round the keel
     Where cool, deep-hearted lilies float,
And hear thro’ wild syringas steal
     Some songster’s drowsy note.

It is the time, at eve, to lie
     And in a hammock faintly sway,
To watch the golds and crimsons die
     Across the blue stretch of the bay;
To hear the sweet dusk tiptoe by
     In the footsteps of the day.

I crawled into bed and closed my eyes and not long after heard the small hooves of the horses, the tiny ones that gallop in our dreams, or are they the dreams of our children, galloping through the black ruins. Everything we do is against the crippling light. To hear them cry at night is to know they are alive. When they are scared they come galloping down the long hall calling your name. Tonight, it is our oldest daughter, the red mare with her fiery mane, she snuggles in between us and falls back to sleep in your arms, to that secret place inside her, she barely moves, crossing over the river, through a grove of alders, through the black ruins, she is the one who once whispered, the grass it knows everything.

The widower in silk pajamas slides
his hand along a glossy blue sleeve,

thinking, Water to fabric, rivulet
slipped through a needle’s eye.

He’s all ripples when he moves,
all waves breaking against flesh.

He read in the paper the human body is
80 percent water. He is almost

a brook when he wanders
around the yard, practically a river

flowing upstream when climbing stairs,
the distant past of Pacific salmon

leaping over his shoulders. He naps
for hours on a king-size, the mattress

dimpled where two bodies slept
together for decades. Dreaming,

he is the relative of that lake
where he tipped the urn overboard.

What was left of her the water
dissolved, becoming the water

and the lulling blue sounds it made
while he paddled back to land.

I hid my heart in a nest of roses,
   Out of the sun’s way, hidden apart;
In a softer bed than the soft white snow’s is,
   Under the roses I hid my heart.
   Why would it sleep not? why should it start,
When never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred?
   What made sleep flutter his wings and part?
Only the song of a secret bird.

Lie still, I said, for the wind’s wing closes,
   And mild leaves muffle the keen sun’s dart;
Life still, for the wind of the warm sea dozes,
   And the wind is unquieter yet than thou art.
   Does a thought in thee still as a thorn’s wound smart?
Does the fang still fret thee of hope deferred?
What bids the lids of thy sleep dispart?
Only the song of a secret bird.

The green land’s name that a charm encloses,
   It never was writ in the traveller’s chart,
And sweet as the fruit on its tree that grows is,
   It never was sold in the merchant’s mart.
   The swallows of dreams through its dim fields dart,
And sleep’s are the tunes in its tree tops heard;
   No hound’s note wakens the wildwood hart,
Only the song of a secret bird.

ENVOI

In the world of dreams I have chosen my part,
   To sleep for a season and hear no word
Of true love’s truth or of light love’s art,
   Only the song of a secret bird.

Mysterious shapes, with wands of joy and pain,
Which seize us unaware in helpless sleep,
And lead us to the houses where we keep
Our secrets hid, well barred by every chain
That we can forge and bind: the crime whose stain
Is slowly fading ’neath the tears we weep;
Dead bliss which, dead, can make our pulses leap—
Oh, cruelty! To make these live again!
They say that death is sleep, and heaven’s rest
Ends earth’s short day, as, on the last faint gleam
Of sun, our nights shut down, and we are blest.
Let this, then, be of heaven’s joy the test,
The proof if heaven be, or only seem,
That we forever choose what we will dream!

Caliban speaks to Stephano and Trinculo.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

Many decades after graduation
the students sneak back onto
the school-grounds at night
and within the pane-lit windows
catch me their teacher at the desk
or blackboard cradling a chalk:
someone has erased their youth,
and as they crouch closer to see
more it grows darker and quieter
than they have known in their lives,
the lesson never learned surrounds
them: why have they come? Is
there any more to memorize now
at the end than there was then—
What is it they peer at through shades
of time to hear, X times X repeated,
my vain efforts to corner a room’s
snickers? Do they mock me? Forever?
Out there my past has risen in
the eyes of all my former pupils but
I wonder if behind them others
younger and younger stretch away
to a day whose dawn will never
ring its end, its commencement bell.

I was an observer: my own student
and my best teacher
in the forest working the lyrics together.
There were bees in his beard,
in a good way.

She cupped his chin: this
was platonic and also the source
of some honey. He fed her
two lines he had kept inside his soul
for years. I woke to write them and could

only remember alone.
He left and she
grabbed a banjo from a tree—
completed the song and bettered
it, besides. Something like “The Passionate Shepherd”

but blue, which the Impressionists
knew to put a touch of in every shadow.
Cut to: the sprung-open backs of a dozen watches.
Time was
busted; still

I didn’t fix the hands of clocks I could have moved.
The bells and cuckoo birds,
the dancing German ladies
with their aprons and their steins
shilly-shallied willy-nilly

throughout the day. And anyway,
I’ve learned naught if I haven’t learned not
to tell anyone when he or she
has appeared in a dream—
he or she never takes it the right way.

It does all sound unseemly, I admit—especially the horse, which I’ll get to.

Though I do want to ask—I guess
it’s less of a question, more of a comment—
if the song or the honey skips
a generation, the same as twins
or a quick temper?

Before the dream I was thinking of the horse
who bit the cowboy so you could see straight
through to his skull.
The horse that won’t be broken isn’t a romantic
story—it’s a shame and ends

with the horse hurting
a human then being put down.
Damned if I don’t worry that the horse is a mirror,
like the trainer says. Damned if I’m too afraid to push myself
out even so far as my own dream.

I only have two tools:
attention and inattention.

The rest—
just for show.

But credit where it’s due:
that banjo in the tree was a nice touch, subconscious,
a real lucky break.