Hecate
All this happens on my pillow – here
travellers lay down their dreams,
asking me to break them open.
And I do, spread them out on the wide
landscape of my blanket,
where they play peek-a-boo
until morning; when, narrowed
by the fear of waking,
they steal away again.
I am an oneiric gardener.
I tend to them softly, hardly
understanding how my own
dreams
doze away unheeded.
The day I went back
The day I went back from being a poet
of extinct thought
to being a reader, saying, No, dears
to the May beetles in my head,
these impossible creatures,
to find the relief of capitulation –
how this handed me back my kinship
with words!
Now I let it pass me by when it comes,
my voice. Not through me, I tell it,
the way one’s parents’ most memorable words
are, Quiet. Not now. Say later,
Later.
How late never is.
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