Dream on, for dreams are sweet:
     Do not awaken!
Dream on, and at thy feet
     Pomegranates shall be shaken.

Who likeneth the youth
     of life to morning?
’Tis like the night in truth,
     Rose-coloured dreams adorning.

The wind is soft above,
     The shadows umber.
(There is a dream called Love.)
     Take thou the fullest slumber!

In Lethe’s soothing stream,
     Thy thirst thou slakest.
Sleep, sleep; ’tis sweet to dream.
     Oh, weep then thou awakest!

—after Michael Heizer

I may be looking at the set of boulders
that is now in front of me, but it is you I am addressing.

You are near or you are far,
depending on the accuracy of the words I have chosen.

When my teacher told me to use this
instead of the, she was talking about the range between

the intimate and the conventional. The gray cluster
is radiant, but it is a melancholy radiance.

To describe it only seems to lean away
from what I intend. Maybe, then, touch is a better way

of explaining the pleasure of that
encounter: the surprise and familiarity of the plant

that you brush past in the dark of your
own house. Or maybe the always-new logic of a dream

is closer to the truth: the falling that takes place
in a place where there is no ground.

The boulders are there for me, an arrangement
and its warren of rooms. One door opening to foggy roses.

Another one opening to a dawn that is the color of tea.
Surely there will always be new language

to tell you who I am, imagination rousing
out of idleness into urgency, reaching now towards you.

I keep remembering my teacher and she is an image
of joy, the small and wordless music

of her silver bangles. This over the.
One of the rules for writing the poems of a lonely person.

    The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves
           is not the same wild west
                                                   the white man found
It is a land that Buddha came upon 
                                               from a different direction
    It is a wild white nest
                              in the true mad north
                                                               of introspection
           where ‘falcons of the inner eye’
                                                             dive and die
                     glimpsing in their dying fall
                                                  all life’s memory
                                                               of existence
               and with grave chalk wing
                                                draw upon the leaded sky
      a thousand threaded images
                                                  of flight

It is the night that is their ‘native habitat’
  these ‘spirit birds’ with bled white wings
          these droves of plover
                              bearded eagles
                                           blind birds singing 
                                                             in glass fields
  these moonmad swans and ecstatic ganders
                                                                       trapped egrets
                                                   charcoal owls
                                                                       trotting turtle symbols
  these pink fish among mountains
                                                       shrikes seeking to nest
                       whitebone drones
                                                   mating in air
                among hallucinary moons
And a masked bird fishing
                                          in a golden stream
     and an ibis feeding
                                   ‘on its own breast’

           and a stray Connemara Pooka 
                                                           (life size)

And then those blown mute birds 
                                            bearing fish and paper messages
       between two streams
                                  which are the twin streams
                                                                           of oblivion
           wherein the imagination
                                             turning upon itself
             with white electric vision
                                           refinds itself still mad
                            and unfed
                                            among the hebrides