Dream Plates: Six Visions from the Work

Trochaic meditations on images that arrived without origin — the Splendor Solis refracted through the places where sleeping goes.

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I. The Drowning King’s Bathroom

Copper piping runs to nowhere,
Tiles are floating, walls are gone.
In the bath the bearded sovereign
Sits dissolving, calm as stone.

Mercury is dark and heavy,
Stars reflect that should not be.
Seven medals ring the basin —
Saturn, Luna, planets three.

Plumbing never works in dreaming,
Light is always slightly wrong.
Here the king has found the error
Useful. He has known it long.

White bird perches on the granite.
Water darkens. Gold descends.
Every bath is dissolution.
Every drowning recommends.

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II. The Seven Flasks in the Department Store

Mannequins in evening silence
Watch the windows, seven deep.
Every flask contains a planet,
Every planet holds a sleep.

Lead is grey and coiled with dragons,
Tin is lifting into birds.
Iron cradles something newborn,
Gold is raging past all words.

Copper spreads the peacock feather,
Mercury defeats the sun.
Silver — last — contains the scarlet:
Moon has swallowed what was done.

Fluorescent light and planetary
Glow compete above the floor.
Nothing here is sold or purchased.
Nothing leaves this kind of store.

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III. The Peacock’s Tail at the Amusement Park

Every eye-spot holds a landscape:
Campus, library, and stair.
Carousel of leaden horses
Turns behind the iridescent air.

Ferris wheel against the margin
Where the night becomes the dawn.
Cauda Pavonis — every colour
Burning just before it’s gone.

This is what the Work produces
After dragon-fire and black:
Beauty that has no opinion,
Colour with no wish to track

Where it came from or is going.
Rides are still. The peacock spreads.
All the places sleep remembers
Shining in its feathered threads.

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IV. The Hermaphrodite in the Library

Two-faced figure, crimson-wingèd,
White wing folded, mirror raised.
Shelves extending past all counting,
Amber-lit and golden-glazed.

In the mirror: not the holder
But the library, more clear —
Sharper than the space around it,
Truer than what brought you here.

Rebis. Double thing. The union
Of the reading and the read.
Every spine inscribed with symbols.
Every symbol is a seed.

Male and female share the halo.
Neither face is looking down.
Both are gazing past the mirror
Into shelves that never brown.

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V. The Dark Sun Over the Carnival

Tarnished face against the winter,
Sinking toward the fairground bare.
Roller coaster stands like dragon
Bones against the pink-grey air.

In the puddle something reptile
Crouches, cold, and does not stir.
Carousel is dark and heavy.
Nothing moves. The trees are bare.

Then — a seam. A crack of golden
Light that splits the sun in two.
Sol Niger is not the ending.
Sol Niger is breaking through.

Butterflies along the border
Crowd the frame with what comes next.
Every darkness holds a sunrise.
Every shell conceals a text.

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VI. The Angel on the Campus at Night

Sodium lamps on concrete pathways,
Rain on Gothic stone and grass.
Crowned and winged, the angel offers
Crimson lined with gold — a clasp

For the body smeared with darkness,
One arm ruddy, one arm white.
Seal of Solomon is blazing
Where the campus meets the night.

Grace does not arrive in temples.
Grace arrives on paths like these —
Wet cement and broken street-light,
Dormitories, autumn trees.

Take the cloak. It smells of churches.
Take the hand. The mud will dry.
Every campus holds an angel
For the ones who don’t ask why.

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Dream Plates is a continuing series. The images arrive. The verse follows. Neither claims an author.