January dreams
In this dream I have become the fingers that pluck the last words from the dying soldiers’ lips. Above me, around me are the hills of yellow and rust-brown gas, the short white flares of explosions and the sounds that make craters in the night. Within me the fingers, the dead lips, the collection of last words:
Mama…!
The names of girls and women.
A sea, a sea.
The prayers, the curses. A few words, a few breaths, to keep the cold away for just a little longer.
One ticket please.
And the sounds that are not words: the screams and sighs.
Above me and around me the war, the storm. Within, the fingers, the words, the torn cloth of life.
Blood, so much blood.
Mama…?
The fingers are now spiders of dying light that dances through the trees. A web of dying and blood; the drops that will fertilize the night, this sea of dark. Fingers of burning red glass.
(The night breaks: half dream, half life. The body reaches for the light, a sound. A lazy slide guitar. Keith Richards and Wild horses.)
I am awake. Everything is quiet, deep and dark. Then the screaming and the dying colours of a passing ambulance. An old woman who embraces the dark like her first love? A child that dies, its lungs now still and filled with fluids?
I’m slowly drifting away again; going under. My legs are old and dying trees; my arms are roads that reach for faraway fingers. The rest is nothing.
(From great distance now, Leonard Cohen: Dance me to the end of love.)
A fat man dances - a bear; the tower. Stars and roses - and everything fades away again, into nothing, into life. From far away a choir:
The pain of Heaven, the pain of Heaven.
Someone in a grey coat, who cries or prays:
The pain of Heaven.
Again the tower. Flowers dancing like wild horses; strange murmurs, impossible colours. And then the wind and the whisper music of dying. The night a whirling.
Half awake for a moment, half forgetting. Then, fading away again, I see a tree with birds for leaves and then it’s just the night again: the cars outside. The night: the dark and the stars - and you beside me, your breath my anchor.
2)
Whispering mountains that reach for us from far away; a moon like a last, happy breath, high above:
We dance.
The sea lies still and old before us. A tapestry, covering all sleeping life, where the storm forever waits:
We dance.
This is our island, our life. Some seagulls in the sky, the smell of seaweed; the endless waiting of the world; the years where we now live:
We dance.
And I love you, I love you. I say:
I love you.
You smile.
We dance.
Somewhere people build their cities; somewhere else cities are burning. Books get written. A poet sings. People are born and die. Invisible ships seek a different light and fishes float through dreams. But this is the curve, the edge of all:
We dance.
Everything is filled with this strange, bespoken light:
I love you.
Your feet so sure, your arms around me. I dream the war and the dying far away from us. Your lips so close, half asking, half surprised but always a welcome: the light that binds me. All the cathedrals that we build these seconds are forever stone and sand and drops of water and all a hand can find in the wind, the turning of leaves, the breaking of the waves.
This beach:
We dance.
I say:
I love you.
And you say:
Come.
And I dream on, deeper and deeper into this night, this cold, strange January night. January: month of the broken, two-faced God. One face for the dying, one face for the light.
I know what holds me, what I truly want. I follow you. There’s nothing between us now. The sea, the cities and cathedrals, the books and the war: everything moves further back from us. My name now on your lips now, my fingers in your hair. And one more time and always, like a dying breath:
I love you.
Then the silence after our moving. Your back still arched, your breath a stutter that tells me what I know:
I love you.
Then the far mist of stars, the emptiness and the house where we now live:
We dance.
Those last words, before the cold, before eternity - before I must return.
Before the phantom fingers descend upon the battlefield again. Before they touch my lips and take these words.
Before the end of dreaming:
We dance.