To See It
by Daniel Corrie
I feel the dream coming from
a different head, the man who dreams
of drowning,
how he looks up at himself through ice
and can’t make out the warning to turn
and go back to shore.
Then the dream like a TV screen
flashes ice ridges falling
away into the slush of sea. Frozen suddenly
like a ripple through a photograph,
I wake to heat rippling
through night
and go outside.
Mosquitoes jolt and climb
humid darkness. Chains of stars
fling through summer. Along the pond’s bank,
the moon unclouds
to cypresses brightening. They seem to lean
toward some cue that,
in this waking, comes too fast for preparation.
This spawn we are
sometimes follow the distances
of pine branches that might reach beyond
smoldering nebulae
playing through a brain
grown lost in dreaming.
Then my eyes have opened
to tomorrow’s thrown stones
skipping one by one,
scattering and vanishing.
I think down into the startled pond
rippling like a sea evaporating
from my restless sleep,
deeper than where each rock breaks
through the tree line’s
mirrored, false image.