1.
Pillow filled with
empty blue bottles
clank as you tread
the walkways of sleep.
Who is your farmer,
who harries your corn?

2.
The colors do it
by themselves,
the autumning. Can
the word come from avis,
when the leaves
fly away like birds.

3.
Easy cry New!
when the oldest
thing in the world
is new every day–
Pound told us that,
he heard it in China
where he never was—
is that new enough?

4.
New enough to be green still?
Early October
the dreams come thick
and waking is a compromise.

5.
Follow the dream
dreams don’t
know how to lie
or tell the truth.
They tell and tell
till you are told.
Cling to the banisters
of sleep until, until, until…

6.
Windows shut,
heat turned on,
slept ill.
The softest
things we know
are full of bones.
I repeat, nothing is easy.
Dawn is a priest
looks at me severely—
every window is a church.

7.
Catenary—the way
a cable swoops,
how a straight line
behaves in the real world,
o pallid geometers.
The shortest distance
is always around some corner.
Lie on your side,
listen to your blood
talk into the pillow.
The pillow will remember, be careful who you sleep beside,
morning always asks hard questions.

8.
I mean we eat the kale
but do not know the farmer.
We see the lake but I don’t swim.
See the difference? What if
the air was pure oxygen,
what would we see growing then?
We need the dark, the quiet one
with tender eyes who tells us No.

3 October 2020