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.