A Page From a Dream

(A Page from Dream:)



the page looked like this, in the sense that a sentence was continuing from an earlier page, but what is the earlier page of a dream? Is the answer any clearer than if I asked: what is the earliest dream? But it looked like this, the way a page in a book looks, a page in a slim English book of a few decades back, a book about the poet Louis MacNeice and his book or long poem Ten Burnt Offerings which I’d read once on the old B&O train one spring afternoon on my way to Baltimore and we kept stopping by sidings near Havre de Grace, fields full of Queen Anne’s lace. So when the page I was reading got about this far, it quoted some lines from MacNeice:



You’re in God’s

wee hands now and the world away



and who can say

this is how it looked,

the words go on to make a shape

elegant and lean against the dream,

white of the last page



and then the page went on again, elucidating as I cannot hope to do the few lines I actually saw and retained in dream (the first two verses above, and then just the shape of the rest) and I woke up thinking about MacNeice’s voice when I heard him read once, that dry intelligent voice with what I would come to know as the Belfast upbeat in the last word of every poem, like the trope we heard a decade back in the talk of Valley girls, uptalk, and I thought about girls from the valley, and MacNeice and all the dead, dead railroads, dead cities, dead friends and pages that are always virgin, ready for new life, fields of space open just like this


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Ready Steady Book