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Infinite City

by Will Walker

 

This one dreams of a flower

whose petals are steeped in purple

and burgundy and rose and deep silence,

the kind that settles on a mountaintop

 

after the hikers arrive, chatting and pissing,

sneezing in the light breeze, then tramp on

as though there were someplace else to be.

 

Next door, a dreamer threshes wheat,

and her neighbor ten feet up, straight through her ceiling,

works with his grandfather's stamp book,

 

long since gone—but in this dream the trout

in the rocky stream swims easily out of the frame

of its commemorative and glides into the next square,

which happens to be Notre Dame—and then moves on

 

to Lascaux and floats among the bulls, forever frozen

in cavorting. Across the street the boy who's fallen asleep

with his baseball glove sees a fat pitch and swings

so hard he falls into the gigantic popcorn bin behind first base.

 

There's such a din of dreams the drunks spilling out

of the bars at 2:00 a.m. can't even wake one sleeper

for their high-pitched serenade to beer and more beer.

 

Even the dogs are busy dreaming, but they won't ever

tell us what. After midnight, they join their ancestors

high on the overlooking hills, in the busy moonlight,

howling as if dawn will never come.