Friends Dreaming
Miriam Levine
1974
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Excerpts from Friends Dreaming
Miriam Levine
iii
Our house is a box
set on a mountain—
glassed in on one side
where the sun comes in
hot at noon off the snow.
Sky: azure, sapphire, cloudless.
I stand at the wheel;
I am not tired;
I am not hungry;
no one cries.
The walls are lined with what
I have made at this wheel.
When you come in
we watch it all:
the shelves of curving pots,
the wheel going round,
wet clay turning in my hands,
shape rising.
v
Red clay paths twist and wind
like markings on an old map.Robed figures incline their thoughtful heads
as in The School of Athens.Red, blue and gold: a burning glass.
Along the path the thick grass
glows like a jewel—I
don’t know how else to describe it,
a garden of art, but alive!
We walk and hear the water; closer,
we see the silvery ripples lap
where a boy in a sailor suit
unwinds a ball of string,
letting his toy boat drift out.
vi
Why should we dream like
art we know? A Dada nightmare.
Is vision a mistake?
The inner eye—I’ll show you mine:
sliced in two like a hard-boiled egg,
the pupil lengthens to a yellow tunnel.
At the end, a windowless room.
Behind my eye: yellow clay,
bulging walls, chains and pulleys,
a coil of copper wire unwinding,
shaking in space
like the branch of a tree.