The First Dream

The First Dream


The Wind is ghosting around the house
tonight and as I lean against the door
of sleep I begin to think about the
first person to dream, how quiet he must
have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention
of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself
to sit on a rock and look
into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself
what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere
without going,

how he had put his arms around
the neck of a beast that the others
could touch only after they had killed
it with stones,
how he felt its breath
on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could
have come to a woman,
though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone
near water,

except that the curve of her
young shoulders and the tilt of her
downcast head would make her appear
to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as
the first person to ever fall in love
with the sadness of another.

Billy Collins

Posted over on Poemhunter