Sometimes you dream so hard
The clocks of your mind begin
To melt inside a Dali painting,
And the continents of your heart collide,
Pushing up mountains on which the hunter inside
You searches for the sacred white deer.
White mountains, white snow, white Buffalo, white sorrow;
The land’s blood is white, and the white moleskin bison skins
Flap in the wind as crystals soak the mountain.
We are sucked through the river’s white pipe.
Tobacco like water, river like smoke,
Our black walnut branches freeze
Fruit into the shadow Mother’s feathered bed.
But when we beat our drums,
To remember what we danced
And sang and the silence glances
Between her shadowy apparition and vapory vanish,
What will happen to those snow ringed owl nights
Darkened by just her eyes,
Blown by grasses and anchored by stone?
The white deer of our spirit was in the mountain
And also rested on her shoulders.
How many generations she will breed
Be run off cliffs
Pierced by the insatiable arrows
Dragged away by a mountain lion mouth?
Then we shall flank the grove of milky white pine
And fill its lungs with Arctic animal spirit.
We will ever dream so intensely,
And love so dearly, our tears
Will become rain and our desire blackened soil,
And golden leafy dreams will spiral down,
Floating through the stars
Giving birth, like an angel,
To the next door we open,
And the path of dreams blossoming in
The dew of the night’s first dawn.
Then our song will never
Be written, but instead,
Be sung.
©2009 Stephen Pickering. All rights reserved.
Leave a Reply