Dreams, April 1981

so it is death is the

condition of infinite form—

the rebellion of particulars,

ourselves and each thing,

even ideas, against that infinitude,

is the story of finitude—the

dream of the children harvested

in a harvester-machine

there are the real voice

and the voice imagined

and both have a reality,

but the latter is out of it

the ladder of things

never accept gifts from the gods

—Hesiod’s bitter-sweet sense of it—

rings true and doesn’t

settle the sea-shore down

to where the heart breaks or is bronzed

‘I am happy,’ the man said,

‘because the toad of the morning

is the worst thing I’ll find today’

and CBC’s TV critic says, ‘television

is the Shakespeare of the 20th century’

red lilies fall on the carpet

and Art Tatum, drawing his art

out of hymns, wanted more dissonance

perfect

there are knives in the air

all around the poorly loved

their lives follow life back

into stone and they dream

a sweeter consonance at the centre

the art of a screaming and

demented oyster is not theirs

but I know both arts backwards

what the clothes man called the ‘world-tissue’

does have a hole in it, ‘must be,’

he said, ‘darned-up again’

it is the substance must change—

that is, our sense of it—a music

among word-whiskers—among

dreams of the blue dog running

verdant hills my words do not

crack it—the pure spelling lesson,

short of breath, goes back

to perform words so to perform

the music of any past period

is simply, and profoundly, to seek

the life that is within death that

plenishes fills the house with

argued furniture and rests

he listened to the lark so long

he didn’t recognize the doorman

Copyright Credit: Robin Blaser, “Dreams, April 1981” from The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser. Copyright © 2006 by Robin Blaser. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.

Source: The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser (University of California Press, 2006)