Planisphere Q "Dreamland", Summer 2022
The Dream Of Juniper
I feel into the perpetual motion that is this life
If not down at my shuffling feet
In the other appendages of mind.
Though your voice today is faint,
you and this terrestrial chorus one,
I sense your blistering force,
And I come to you.
Your seemingly lifeless weathered branches
reveal a quickening in the moonstruck scent
of the blood that flows beneath this apparent death,
bolstered by clumps of ovules any one of which
might gestate into offspring.
These fertile berries I have tasted in your gin
under whose guidance I carved
a one-stringed instrument from your boughs,
and learned to keep time in countless jams
under the rhythms of stars
which seemed to never stop.
From your root foundations in my heart
I once built a home in my mind
its eventual burning to the ground
recognition of the tough lessons in life.
Like everything we make is temporary.
Except for love.
Then in those moments of love gone awry
when I’d prefer it all would just stop
you tell me it could.
But somewhere, say your hypnotizing oils
deep in your heartwood, it all goes on these red
passions woven through the fabric of life
In the singing and playing
In the birthing of babies
In despondency and downheartedness
In love and Joy
Even in the burning
it will all go on.
Just when you think it must stop
it will all go on, you say.
All of it.
All of this.
Hold On This Dream
​Big dream this recent night
It was a blazing gem:
the meaning of life shining
on a beam of happiness.
I knew come morning it would be gone
I knew if I rose up at that moment
half asleep in a haze,
committed it to paper
so fragile and precious
it would somehow shatter
lose what held
as hope in a world
sometimes without
Without the things that raise us up
deliver us the forgotten things
like the sun through the trees
in the dark forest.
I caressed it, tucked it in
and we rested
and upon waking
sure enough,
specifics erased,
Something remained I’m quite certain
would not have if I’d clung to it
with the hooks of words
(as we do with other subliminal affairs.)
Better left in the dreamworld
unseen bolstering our waking,
holding me now in these darker times.
A Child's Dream
If I tell you this story
of my body’s journey beyond,
I risk a scuffle in our minds
to grasp a common ground
and choose a peaceful path.
If our hearts are too full
of nonmalleable and hardened things,
then there is no soft pillow
for the infant of our beginnings
to rest her head and dream.
And in this dream our world
begins and ends, walks and flies,
geese pointed south overhead
on the way to the flaming hearth
of our humongous home.
By this fire, through stories
you will tell, she will remember
in the flickering of nighttime words
why she is here and where
she must return by the end.