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,
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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
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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.
I dreamed of an island, she said,
I was there, I said.
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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,
So? I said. So, she said,
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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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