The considerable has taught us the greatest elephant trick was making memory a luxury. The archetypal mind opened obviously like a run in a nylon stocking and all of its people were jumbled in fits of dialect. Fits that spared nothing. All of the details turned to a sharp edge, cutting the synapses in halves, quarters, eighths—portions fed back into the elephant disguised as moments of silence for the aggrieved.
The dead play solitaire in their pajamas and listen to Bartok. They are discs along a necklace of an abacus. They may pair off one by one, lanterns at the stations of a foreign god's nerves and they may believe otherwise sunk in the ground framed by a hole. This and that little thing around our necks. Pharmaceuticals blocking off the future. Are we the deepest dreamer, the sense lock on Sirius? I am waiting to bait these houses for the next of kin.
Tonight I will leaf through the dictionary and search for reasons.
There are many words to follow. I trace the path of a fallen star
that has dropped into the little cluster of houses where I live.
Nothing in the streets but driven gravel.
I listen for the sound of water washing into the storm drain.
I think the leaves are being swept along. They follow.
I follow the little disturbances in the night:
the acorn rolling down the roof, the rustle of the highest leaves.
A tree is a typical kind of exclamation.
It says I am here to the night. But the stars refuse to listen.
They have found their own excuses for being here tonight.
They stand as sentries the same as I do—
my son sleeping in the crib in the next room.
He dreams of a world moving vaguely out beyond him
in all directions. All sense, all blurred mood.
So, what is the reason for dreaming of figures
with clear boundaries, for a constellation of words?
The masterful tule fog slips through my defenses.
Tim Kahl is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW books, 2009) and The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup and the poetry video blog Linebreak Studios. He is also editor of Bald Trickster Press and Clade Song. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He currently houses his father's literary estate—one volume: Robert Gerstmann's book of photos of Chile, 1932).