Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

How many symphonies would they eke out
before the unrelenting knock of Fate?
If only Sleep, that dark-eyed panda,
were less the brazen thief — if only dreams
could quicken the long drear nights
with more than a passing vision.
I do not need to dream-quest Mt. Yaanek —
a quiet study would do, a reading lamp,
a chair and a sturdy book. My ka,
my lazy double, my astral body
can lounge on a hammock with a Dickens novel,
or browse through the night-locked Athenaeum.
Never too late to learn the names of trees,
of sleeping birds and withered flowers.
Or maybe I’d walk with book in hand
barefoot in graveyard, a midnight reader
of horror tales, epic reciter.
I’d make the dead listen to the Faerie Queene,
count on their fingers the knights and Moors
of the endless Orlando Furioso,
wear them out with the embracing lists,
the straw that stuffs the Song of Myself.
Maybe my eyes would retrace Shakespeare.
But this is Autumn: lamp-dousing time
for my waking self, long nights sliding
to the gravity of solstice, dead leaves
like pages escaping me unreadable.
Not years enough to read them all,
not years enough to count them!
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