This recurring dream after the lethargies
of listless reading, restless wanderings
through books that always seem posthumous,
words another might have read
with profit, falling from the hand like tattered leaves
the trees cast off, picked up and scattered
on a casual walk, blank pages shredded as snow
that mounts against the window he raps on.
How does he know my name when I am so often another
in the dream? This body isn’t mine, but takes me travelling
when it moves. There, I am only the ghost
who starts the play, attendant on my spectacle.
He wants to be like that, the absent
omnipresent one; he wants to be the blood-red moon
and not the startled children pointing. Nothing
startles him; he wants it to inherit me.
In the dream I am always posthumous,
the sole survivor of myself
in the rubble of my city soaked in soldiers
and fine-grained mist. That’s my brother,
he lies, and leaves me with a photograph of snow.
As if it were a photograph of me. One is anywhere
in the dream. So that’s where I wait, and of course he
is there,
invisible as always, a doorway as always,
with the fear that nothing comes to an end.
He wants to do everything just once, he sleeps
eyes open. So I won’t miss it when it comes back. So it won’t be
the same. He plays a game with clouds and calls it
swimming,
washes ashore as the world. Made of the singular. Made of
the blanks. The one standing at the half-open door
with a familiar shape, the one in bed who can’t move.
Who is it, I ask, but he won’t tell me his name.
Leave a Reply