Riding to Ronda

What can be remembered,
what made up—

The unsure eye
slips this to that
in landscape past the bus-glass.
Trees stream into olive
ceiling / sky
flipped into ground. A pond dissolves to
leafless / greenish
clouds the stuff of cotton-floss flung up.

            When Noah had enough of one dull colour
he dispatched the dove.
She brought him back an olive branch; next sortie
she vanished—
                      out of form > disorder

or these clouds forever morphing—swan to dog
to donkey, Don Miguel and Dulcinea;
Sancho Panza’s staff (for he had once commanded sheep),
to high white turbines.

And Rilke wrote in Elegy Six of urge to action,
rivering air; of Samson, how his destiny
was buried in his breast. When he smashed those pillars,
he burst out of the force of flesh, into a narrower
world where he went on choosing…

I recall deciding
                      at the stony lip of a bridge—
singularly beautiful and Romanesque, like Ronda’s.

                      Or was this only in a poem…
or had I already leapt?

And was it into water after air, or into arms?
            And didn’t you not let on,
for the sake of subtlety,
                  my heaviness—

Theory of Dreaming

The garden
my solace, especially in winter: plants
detach and snow
obliges stone.

I sit at the window alone,
insular as January.
Still.

The trees have a static quality too, like stars,
though slowly, very slowly becoming Suns.
Their thin limbs radiating outward.

Lifetimes pour before me.
Here I sit awaiting a car, there awaiting the war.
A shepherd,
then a girl with a hump, like mother.
But more like sister: we’re twins.
She the lighter; I the dark and heavier;
she the fey ~

The air outside is thick with beings—
vertical in falling snow.
Close as claustrophobia,
though not confined to the garden.

Maybe they’re angels. If so,
what is their message—
Is it that if I live on, I become a figment of one?

And is it actually January, or am I already gone?

Perhaps we all are angels.
          And have given up our flesh,
and are no longer free.