Cold in the night the locomotive’s horn
Cries over inland wastelands to the sea,
And stirring to that voice, while the house lies still
With light unspeakable rifting past the sill,
I hear a call: all that becomes of me
Startles awake, waking unseeing on a world new-born.
What dreams I start from: unreeled for private show,
Prints of the past, desires, self-repair.
Their work undone, the film stutters and stands
To this, the naked self on its own hands
And loosened to the night, this bed, this square
Of room dusted with moonlight and a stranger grown.
A horn over the water from the past:
Miles off in dark a jet of steam has blown
Vivid in air, wisped off in a warm rain,
And swells in air towards me, in seeming drowned
Where root with blossom, love with lover, join
To break in more than sound on this inhospitable coast.
I wake to withering, all my blooms at a stroke
Rotted to dust, the sound-wall broken down,
And years I travelled by the jet of dreams
Have dwindled to these bones called by my names:
All wires cut, no lens but the eye’s own
Can shape the dark before me out of rage or hope.
More than a dream? Is it ghost or man who leaves
The wide bed where the other sleeper stirs?
She dreams to my motion coiling round her days,
Jostled with crowd and shades of mine she chose
That bloom for her defeating miles and years.
Let her dream on forever after shapes she loves!
I move beyond her to night’s edge and chill,
Seeing and wake at the window, and once more
The long plaint of the train warning its road
Trembles beyond my hand, desire, word.
This, then, is real? Night, cold, some lost desire?
We are what we have made from chance and will,
And I lie down again in luck with her enthralled.
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