By willtobe1
Date: 18 March 2001

Dream

I slipped away from a love in a dream, just then.

Now I lay lightly by, in the new-slatted pearly hour, barely daring my life’s need to breathe lest I scatter one wreath of the smoky sad scene that has yet to be fixed in my mind’s burning eye.

She was singing, as she faded beyond those undawnable walls, “The Sound of Music” in a heartbreaking springwater voice.  (From what distant shore that tune might’ve washed is a mystery I’ve not yet had means to explore.)  And from me, from my mind as I woke, came the sounds of the answer-back, down-scending notes…

    “…my heart wants to sing every song it hears
     My heart wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise
         From the lake to the trees
     My heart wants to sigh like the chime that flies
         From a church on a breeze
     To laugh like a brook when it trips and falls
         Over stones on it’s way
     To sing through the night
          Like a lark who is learning to pray…”

So stark was the dark of her eyes in the palest untouchable skin that they were the last things to fade as I woke.  So light was the life of her long-crinkle hair that the wind of my whistling unbreasted and danced it.   So undefined and so unfixed in time that she faded, downward from face and backward in mind.  She rose to me like a bubble from deep murky sleep only to burst at the surface.  

She was singing, I’m sure, of the one dream that’s real from the dreamland beyond: “Give me space, give time; I must unfurl for once this real spirit of mine.  Let me breathe, let me dance; let me have just one chance.  Gladly, O gladly, will I grip the thorn for the rose!”  

And I know her.  I had written a poem for her once, long ago, but had not known for whom till now.  Away in a leaden file it lies, even now.  I breathed it but did not free it.  I just didn’t know how…

Your heart will be blessed, my little love of dreaming, and I’ll sing you once and evermore…