A current like a noise machine through sleep.
Blue lichen fields. Mossed boulders. Waking up
to ice cubes cracking in a plastic cup
and voices (“awesome for the Hong Kong branch
. . . well, most of all we miss our daughter . . . ”) I still
see it: the climb up slate as runnels spill
from some bare misted summit like a source.
Whatever sense this dream might make
to others. And whatever when they wake
they also have been dreaming. Rivers of faces
down hallways, merging, as desires mesh
and fissure. Cash for clothes or arms or flesh.
And if there is no towering sublime
where all comes clear to all, no final climb
through cloud, like some old Bible illustration:
how could that ever stop the current flowing
out of the glass at jfk: skin glowing
plumb and peach as we walk inside the sun