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Geometry Of Dawn

Dreamed before 1983 by Bruce Kawin

In the middle of a mountain I know, she said,
there is a man and a tree of silver.
The leaves of the tree are words.
He shows you a branch, he shakes it,
and deep in the mountain
the words fall like slow fog:
you are beautiful, fated, open,
whatever the leaves say.
You smile stupidly at all this information
until you see that the words have left spaces on the branch
like a line in I Ching.
These spaces
he proceeds to interpret.

That silver litter, she says,
is the language of men.
God speaks in the sequence of space.
No, I said, the language of men
is binary, the leaf
that is there or not,
itself or not;
the language of God is every shape at once,
the flow of itself through space.

Very well, she said, I know another story
but this one you must not repeat.
She blew a smoke ring.
I looked for the center
and fell through a torus of cloud
that turned round itself
and would not seem to leave me
all of that night.

The rock said, how much of an island
can you rccognize?
A wave of rock
on a wave of water, I said.
Not bad, said the rock. Now
what do you mean by wave?
The regularity of space
as it passes through itself, I said.
Good, said the rock, I have a shack
for you and your beloved
to continue to discuss these things
and when you are tired, to sleep,
and when you are aware as this water
to flow through each other and shape to yourselves
the image of you together.


You mean speak to the universe, I said,
in its own terms?
That's right, said the rock,
although what could be not our terms
I fail to imagine.

I went to the desert and met her on a rock.
She was playing with her leg and singing
as if to the muscle:
          Many are perfect
          but you are beloved
(she sang, and flexed her foot)
          and so you should dance.

I dreamed of an island, she said,
that was not elemental
so much as it was prime.
There was a wall of ghosts
disguised as a cliff;
it stood between us
and the room of proof.

I was there, I said.
Yes I told you, she said.
No, I said, I mean I was actually there.
I knew when you woke up
by the way you faded out of the landscape.
Then I went through the cliff
and found this flower of sound.
Here it is, back from dreams
and for you.

There was a boy, she said,
who lived in color.
He was born in the color of the trunk
of this olive tree,
which is also the color of 7 pm
in some parts of Massachusetts
and the color of the rock
you spoke with in my dream.
When the boy had tired
of this peculiar gray
he explored the red of this pen
and found himself wherever that color was:
on the ten thousand copies of the cover of that magazine
for instance, or a berry against the snow.
In this way he explored whatever there was
until he had worked out
a sequence of states of being.

He began with his first, the olive bark,
then moved from his darkest blue
to the purples and yellows, all the way to white.
It is the structure of beginning
after years of trial;
it is child's play, and dawn,
the wall that opens behind you.
It serves as a metaphor
for other spectra.

So? I said. So, she said,
let's go to bed.
I don't get the connection, I said.
You will, she said.

EDITOR'S NOTE

This shouldn't work. It's long, it's metaphysical, it's free verse. Three kisses of death! Only it's playful, even goofy, and... flirtatious? I didn't think you could flirt through metaphysics. Kawin, or rather his anima, proves you can.         --Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (v.5, no.2, 1983, p.94-96)



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