First Sleep, Second Sleep, Dream

The whole point of pastoralism

Is that the idyll realizes 

It is unreal. It is a world,

Definitely, an entire world, 

But that world suspends

From an indefinite article,

And, being complete, is complete

Enough to include a sense

Of other worlds, its own incompletion.

The city and city extensions fail

To invade that last peculiarity

Of the forest of evolving dreams.

They have their footpaths, they landscape

The architecture of their claustrophobic parks

Full of persons from all walks of whatnot,

But only seem to ingest and surround. Here,

Let me show you. The town too bright

To see anything but the moon at night

Holds bosky scraps of courtyards,

Murmuring, as if captive. The lion

In the fountain where the couple

Pretend to understand each other's lives

In the guise of lovers beyond their bodies

Thrumming to succumb is quiet,

Metaphorical plaster that growls

Because it does not belong to the town,

The couple in its fountain, the lights, 

Or the moon, such as it is among society,

But to the forest dreaming all of these

In the round realization that what is not

The darkness unadorned must have come

From somewhere else or, if not, must dim

In estimation like the solipsist's mirror, sad

To dream of reading something new,

Then to find only blanks and memories

Among the mushroomed roots.

The woods grow back and bring

Their foolish, bark-peeled pan pipes

With them, deeper and deeper, down and down.