Third Engine (April 2004)

As dreams are poems of day,
so poems are not this boat
but gas the engines of blue seem,
add sound to trawlers trudging in
as I at this hour head on out.
With me here the ache of toils
which spread through yesterday
like the mushroom compost
we worked into the front yard
with three sets of rounds with
that mule-stubborn rototiller,
raking up the clods of bahia
grass and weeds, working in
the smelly offal of hothouse growth
with is sure to grow what
we plant there next.
With me too is last night’s dream
of going back to a job
I’d not seen in six or more years.
The place had changed fantastically,
old enterprises tilled over and gutted
and a new look for all, faux-mall-ish,
glass walls sliding like huge arms
of wealth and monied industry,
great cogs knitting new gears of day
inside, behind, and below
the actual and more solid day.
Here is the third great labor
which has its own dimension
between hot and hotter days
and thicker liquid pour of night,
like dawn somehow composed of both
but devoted to a separate master, tooled
in a crannog just offshore every
other labor where the sound of seem
composes, page by stone by log,
the shape of an in-betweeing man
half in half out of lake-like water,
dreaming of the insiding day
and composting every act of dream.
Here the making is fraught and
necessary abode, though never
it will find harbor except on the page,
and everything on it is forged
in a sweet and futile, blue-robed rage.