The Long Way

Small white stand
For peach crops
Seems to plead,

Please don’t stop.
Real ripe worlds
Need to wait.

No one stops.
Dark gold fruit
Glows in shade.

Why Should You Have Felt That Way?

Last night’s dream was boring starlight,
A heavy net woven of woods
Hanging down from the dark to catch

Dream krill in the forests’ baleen.
You woke up neither sad nor glad
To know that the details would go.

Watching the bald blue now between
Chores you’ve accomplished and meetings
You’ve yet to begin, you wonder

What was boring about those stars?
The correct answer is nothing,
You surmise. Carved at the joints, dreams

Turn out to bind hybrid domains—
First, all things going on in dreams,
Events and faces in strange scenes,

And second, the dream emotions,
Which seem bound to all those events,
As if generated by them

But actually unrelated.
You feel dream emotions surging—
Joy, love, terror, boredom, worry—

While watching regurgitated
Bits of memory cross the screen—
But the emotions are their own.

It’s why nothing feels so vivid
Once you try to retell the dream.
What you dreamed was inadequate

Spur to how you felt about it.
Now, why? Why those two tracks for dreams?
You stare at the bare blue, trying

To see the stars behind the day,
To recapture fuzzy boredom,
But somehow boredom has escaped.