I Wept to Wake

I WEPT TO WAKE

I dreamt

of a menagerie of chambers in villages

of ballooning rooms and curling ferns,

of stained glass tiles and gingerbread panes.

I wandered through apartments 

     of fabric, low ceilings, feathered poufs, pillows to comfort the discomfited;

     of shaking boards, fall-through-into-alligator-pit boards, nails-through-foot boards, Lara-Croft-Tomb-Raider-boards;

     of sea creatures and kelp faces, scaly slitherers moving through bookshelves and dust;

     of seventy-two bathrooms, powder rooms, sneak-glances-in-mirror rooms;

     of fur-coat-filled closets nine miles long where I brushed bare skin with paramours and met gazes filled with shibboleths--Open Sesame! hush--be back at this place at an inopportune opportunity . . . everything you wait for awaits;

     of tiny doors looking out on impossible rose gardens, watered by salt-tear pools and stolen tarts;

     of smoking rooms stuffed with blooming eyes and unpreparedness, glittering mosaics;

     of mawkish violins and morose memories, waning beside a coffin all set for a wake, the form inside it familiar, the single mourner requested ever absent;
of a playground of mathematically preposterous slides of curling, looping, projecting-into-space plastic, where inner children are eaten by laughter;

     of flight a million times, ten thousand ways--run, leap, hover: take air! they are all agape;

     of electricity with your proximity; of a room for two, tigers in the corners, an illusion contingent on nine lives.

     of joy ordained simply--here, unduly, amply--

And I wept to wake.