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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.