The Dream Quartet

The woman who has forgotten words wins at cards.

We’re playing horseshoes by the hyacinths.

Sleeping through mornings became a bad habit.

I’ll build you a poem after lunch or a mountain of sand.

With new medication, I can speak to anyone about trees.

Crabapple blossoms preen the picture window.

We were drinking the pink champagne of flowering pale willows–weeping rain.

Despite elegant wisteria climbing up the house across the chimney–

I was not hysterical.

Blueberry lilacs opened on Saturday, and my father disappears.

Some say the spikes of blue flowers in the lawn are weeds.

The lawnmower is broken this year anyway.

The cartoon deer on the cell phone drinks the stream.

The day, punctuated with gunfire from the shooting range.

There should be a spiritual carwash.

I wear you like sound.

The sparrow, a brown leaf traversing wind.

I paint the canvas yellow, titling it “Forsythia” for now.

His painting rhymed tourmaline with peridot.

How odd we have become after this.

The mute audience shaken by Absurd theatre.

Surds and bedouins.

I’m on a diet of oatmeal and promises.

The coyotes narrow our path.

A Robin’s egg, cracked on the driveway.

Three mourning doves gather grief, shattering.

Monarch butterflies, not more than an inch, fluttering.

We were eating onions to relearn layers.

Sunday tossed egg yolks the color of sun.

The sun knew itself because it had no choices.

Love wasn’t supposed to demolish.

Without shadows, we’re lovely.

There were seven types of memory, boredom, and darkness.

When night gave her stars, we counted them by sevens.

I assumed more stars would grow.

Dreams might dream a liquid plate of moonlight.

I gave someone a city, but he threaded it with golden walls.

Some harbor different strains of chaos.

I come and go, but the others only know the half of it.

The rain kept washing everything except the cities I gave away.

That place where you can’t speak or memorize childhood.

Time becomes a character moving in all directions.

Pain is shed, but no one knows where it goes.

If you fail to love anything, you can’t reappear.

Verbs become sluggish, clinging to nouns, even disappearing–

evening everything out.

Boat capsized; dog lost, boy shot, insurrection, contagion, incineration, smoke to sky.

I’m deleting memories that embarrass me without emotional shrapnel in my hair.

Night, a dark peony, drowns the clouds in its pages of God.