When the dream comes
it likes to tangle itself into lives I've lived:
holding my breath under water
then breathing anyway.
Looking for something lost
in the house where I was a child,
storms and whales hovering
in the sky. Demons and swords
to defeat them, burning swords.
And dropping suddenly down from nowhere
into a sea as blue as it can be.
Red cliffs, and lovers dripping
jewels and honey. Sleeping in a river,
sunrise and moonset at a crossroads.
I drift up and awake, find you
already around me like a nautilus.
Curled around my curl, breathing
your life into the back of my neck.
You twitch in your dream, a brief
convulsion, and I wonder if you,
like me, were swimming upward just then,
chasing the promise of light
as hard as you can.
