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Giles Goodland

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Permanent Dream

There are three principal types of dream:
fleeting, recurrent, permanent.
It is the last that makes you feel
that you are there, incurred,

walking from the bus. You hear it
behind you, its shift from first to second.
Streetlights fold you into the dark.
Another way of bringing the invisible

into mind is to look at it. Do so.
The smell of the moon was like the polish
mum rubbed on her silver with a cloth
the colour of a cloud lit by streetlights.

You open the thought slowly, like
a tin can, to see the serried
peaches in a syrup which falls through
your fingers as you lift first one slice,

then them all. Squeeze them. They are
butterflies, trembling on your hand.
They bear you no ill will. They are made
entirely of thought. They say, so might you be.

It is your job to attend to the babies
who keep crawling in through the cat-flap.
The house is nearly full. You are
anxious about what will happen next.

The feeling that your day has been
entirely foreshadowed. Without your
knowledge, all through the night, clouds mulled
past the window, drew connections,

extemporised you. This coffee you are
drinking has already been drunk.
This is the breath (another person’s) on
the hairs of the forearm, the continuous

night your thoughts have processed.
The bus has just deposited you.
Pinch your arm. Even in daytime, how firm
the dark holds to its stitched shapes.

 

Page(s) 148

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