The Dream of Reason

I Self-Portrait

A house

with three stories.

In the basement, monsters.

The upper floors were empty.

No furniture, nothing.

I had a magic pebble

that I needed to hide.

But where?

Woke in a room

with the bed breathing.

Each day the same

scandal—this body.

These teeth and hands.

2 The Miniature Bed

A miniature bed, and in it two tiny people

not sleeping, not able to sleep because

a small lie has flowered between them,

fragile as a new, white crocus.

The miniature bed holds them like a miniature boat

making its slow, true course to morning.

These tiny people, thoughts thrumming like mice,

are quiet as the lie blooms over them

in the night, fanning its moth petals,

becoming to them like a moon hovering

over their bed, a moon they might almost touch

with their miniature hands, if they weren't certain

that one wrong gesture might break

the spindles of their small world, if their hearts

were not drops of trembling quicksilver,

if they were brave, if they could see

that small is no smaller than big, that thimbles

are deep as oceans for any god, they might even

touch each other then, opening the dark,

like a match, the sun's flaring.

3 Harvest

The fields are a book of uses.

Near the house

a combine takes the corn down

in long rows.

Dust rises up and replaces itself.

A quick net of starlings

drops to the furrows

and sunshine pours like polished grain

onto the feeding earth,

this country.

In the kitchen, milk streams

from the gallon

thin and fresh as luck.

We flourish.

All around us, things flourish.

Cows strain the fence with their abundance.

The herd makes a sound like swelling.

Out in the cut field

birds clean the fallen cobs

into sets of teeth.

4 Sonnet for Lost Teeth

The combines were tearing off the field’s clothes.

It was August, haying season. My tooth

was loose, a snag in the clam of my mouth.

I worked it like a pearl. I'd been out of school

for sixty days. In the sweat of the barn

I watched him shoot the calf in the head.

He wiped the hide gently, like cleaning his glasses.

Overnight, I grew a beard so I wouldn't

have to get married. I let my feet go black

from burned grasses. It never gets easier

he said, kicking straw over the blood patch.

She went down so quiet it was almost

sad. Later, when my tooth fell out, I buried it

under my pillow and it grew into money.

5 Talisman

Waiting for the school bus you find

the femur of a baby animal

on the ground. You carry

that femur in your pocket

the entire morning and touch it

secretly through the cloth.

When the teacher asks

a question you don't raise

your hand but quietly

wrap your fingers around

the thin shape, that bone

without a mother.

6 On Waking

Half of everything is invisible.

A river drifts below the river.

A gesture lost in the body.

Wind moves through the open

windows of the trees.

Beyond the day, another day.

Dreamed I was drowning

my mother's silk laundry

in the river,

kneeling on the wet rocks.

Back and forth I drowned it

in the gray clouds...

7 Eros

Each year fish run the green vein of the river.

The bones of skunks lie buried in the riverbank

upside down, waiting for rain.

From a fragment of a Greek statue

you can tell the posture of the whole god.

A skeleton has the same intelligence.

So that when a girl discovers it,

loosened by summer rain, surfaced

like a white instrument in the grass,

she suddenly knows how to take it up

and shake the strange rhythms from it like castanets.

8 A Childhood

The horse had been beaten and flies

crawled excited on the beat marks.

He held still in the sunblazed pasture.

For a few minutes I stood at the wire fence.

He was aware of me, but he did not turn—

except his eye, slightly. He listened

through the many ears of the grasses.

A jay made a hole in the air with its cry.

Everywhere, invisible as heat, the gods

married each other and went to war.

The excitement of it vibrated in the flies.

As if we both were standing still

inside some greater, more violent motion.