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Edited on Wed Mar-18-09 09:15 AM by BlueIris
"Journal"
In a dream journal kept as an experiment,
evidence of a life that went
on without him while he slept, salvaged
fragments that might yield reservations
about the past or future, he found himself
recording nights they spent together.
On a page of frozen landscape
across which he towed his father,
now shrunk into a child, on a sled
meant to transport a dead battery,
was the August night she'd wiped
their sweat with unbound hair.
Rowing a turbulent sea of doors,
he woke to tingle of wings, a bat
brushing the wind chime in her room,
and hovering lips alighting along
the length of his body. He was lost
on a shore where clarinets were
driftwood, and sunrise a camisole
slipped from her shoulder. Each time
she came, she cried; erect nipples
tasting of tears, earlobes familiar
with their taste of pearls.
The mortgage on his soul was down
to a dollar but where to pay it off?
Baby, she said, we're practicing
kissing interruptus. To save the world
from humankind, a desperate cabal
of cetaceans merged the psychic power
of their enormous brains.
His handprint still emblazoned
on her ass as she stepped into the shower.
Prisoners of war, assigned a classroom
in which to await decapitation,
sat passively at fifth-grade desks
while he paced wishing for a gun,
and when the executioners rushed in
it was another night in which the choice
was death or starting from the dream.
3 a.m. He lay listening to her breath,
wondering should he gently wake her
with his tongue, or let her sleep.
~Stuart Dybek
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