32. The Dream Animal
On the shore of Lake Erie
in the winter, where the ice
consumes the land and the far
dark runs aground with a gravel
rasp.
On the shore, where our teeth grinds
against the stars and echoes
in the snow-speckled air, echoes
against the peninsula held
together by weather and waves.
These thin bones are young
but come from forever.
This nose is just
a little boy’s
isthmus.
Youth follows from
birth every year: bedroom,
church, jaws, cranium,
maps drawn
from the inside
sent on new trajectories,
shaving sinuate borders,
rounding the caloric
flow of the sun.
New rooms begetting clean charts.
They are maps that
plot our escape from the animal
world, that find eons in fledglings,
and excuse cruelty. They are
the myth of an all-child and equations.
We know when the planets
will converge and can
shrink great distances,
enough to traverse them
with radios and oxygen.
And the stars bellow silently
beyond the sky. Anyone can feel
them just out of reach. The winds
are what bring them closer. The earthly
shapes and grassy smells
shudder like ghosts and their long
speechless nonsense
wakes the dream animal from its dream,
leaving design out of it.
When deduction ceases
its babbling reassurances, when logic
is at last a threat to life, then all could be
light. But not for the child washed in symbols,
young and reaching backward,
drawn across its nose into memory.
I am publishing my book of poetry, Place Like Home (or), one post at a time. This is poem number 32. You can find more on my Medium page and at The Junction. Thank you for reading.
