Dream Elements
by hazelfaern (Member) - published: November 6, 2005
Word Count: 227 Word Bytes: 1547 Viewed: 769 times
Category - Poetry
© Copyright by hazelfaern

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Dream Elements

This is the language of reverse origami and water wisdom:
that in my dreams you slide into me effortlessly
just as Soma’s scenery acquiesces, opens to us without question
We do not gape, we do not ask for reason, here, where
meaning lies inherent in each orchestrated movement
suffuses our every skirmish from frame to frame
So, as we dance, our relenting limbs and identities
(even landscapes, forest’s sides, whole cities) cease to be
the moment we no longer need their storied settings
to fable us in a silent volume’s enfoldings and unwindings

These layers, peeled away, lisp-last with less protest than smoke
as what we want leaps to us before we think to ask
and our essential properties, perpetually near exposure
are only slightly difficult to glimpse and understand

Yet what I wake to
is a world of dry mouths and damp hands
surface friction and mere superficial taste
gleaned in paltry spats if I seek sincerely
and meaning lies ambiguously in
my dubious ability to worry math, fret tasks
sort schedules, key sets and knit names to faces

Here, I am always myself, no one else
just as you, there, seem ever to linger
stubbornly in a space in place, apart
which will not fold in to meet me
(never mind gracefully, never mind easily)
no matter how the morning’s lamplight beckons

------
"All the darkness in the world
cannot put out the light
of one candle"

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Comments

The following comments are for "Dream Elements"
by hazelfaern

hazelfaern/ Falling apart.....
..without going to pieces...

"knit names to faces"..."less protest than smoke"..Cool.

"reverse origami"... Indeed.

Enjoyed read.
B7L

( Posted by: Bobby7L [Member] On: November 6, 2005 )

The Esperanto of reverse origami:
A language which, it seems, one needn't speak to instinctively understand.

There are few poets here who write their poems like academic essays, and have the strength of mind - strength of literacy, perhaps - to hold it together. This one seems to be judged just right: the way it shifts in tone upon waking, just when I started to feel it was getting simply too dense, too cerebral, to remain lyrical. (There is, after all, a whole symphony in the first line.) My only quibble would be with the parenthesis, which seem to stutter the flow of things, without containing anything particularly useful.

Oh, it's so rare, these days, that I have the easeful, insightful dreams of your second stanza. I could weep for nostalgia now.

( Posted by: MobiusSoul [Member] On: November 6, 2005 )

Pleasantly Flushed
mobius ~ I'm nearly speechless. How very sweet of you, and then, in certain bits, how very spot-on.

This is one of those poems I've written that I feel fairly amibivelent about -- one of the things that bothers me is that the first few stanzas are cerebral to the point of undoing the imagery and almost impossibly word-dense. I think you're right about the parenthesis. I used them to try to reign in all those words, but I'm not sure if that winds up being worthwhile. Truth is I should probably just sharpen the trusty editing scalpel and heave off a pound or so of verbal flab.

( Posted by: hazelfaern [Member] On: November 8, 2005 )

Antiparentheticaly parethesis
I thought the first part read like prose. I have been writing a lot of that lately, trying to find the muse that will guide me back to the holly grail of "poetry"...but this is not about me. It is like you have this stream of consciousness that is being widdled down to the refined poem that is...the output.

The parenthesis are fine personally. I think that your gesture, parenthesis, adds aclarity to what you are saying, it is like "these are the ways that I would like you to do it, but you aren't."

I am not trying to turn this into a comprehension thing, but the first time I read it, I did not even notice the parenthesis. Perhaps it was just the extant flow, I have no clue.

One last comment. This poem seems visceral, but I think a poem with more tangibleness or emptyness is great too. I mean, "What are they knitting with?" "How (by what medium) are the protestors protesting?" Ponder on this you should.

( Posted by: xinerama [Member] On: November 9, 2005 )

hazel's dream elements
You leave the verbal flab right where it is!

Why even look for another way of bringing this all together?
First of all, your title is as perfectly suited to each stanza here as it is to the totality of the poem. The idea of developing, poetically, "dream elements", is fabulous in its complexity, and in how you have, knowingly or not, addressed both the "elementary" (not necessarily "simple", either) and the "elemental".

Elementary, because you list what dreams are and what they do (water wisdom, the absence of reason, how things suddenly disappear) which is more primal, as process, than listing what dreams effect, or how a dream is experienced, and this would be secondary or tertiary.

Elemental, because you take it to the essence of the dream, make it indivisible except by itself, and elemental because you've got the water and the smoke and the forests and "layers that lisp-last", wow!

Elements, whether alluding to elementary or elemental, never analyze nor do they synthesize. There is always disconnectednes to elements. Elements are like words without grammar or syntax. They are words before grammar and syntax.

And dreams are what if not disconnectedness?

Secondly, and this is important, you do not overlook that dreams are that which we awaken from, and this too is an element, on its own. That moment between sleep and wakefulness is numinous, and often, a moment of poetry, is it not?

Cerebral shmerebral, hazel. You inspire me!

Lucie

( Posted by: windchime [Member] On: November 20, 2005 )

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