
Poeming today on The Art of __(BLANK)__.
The Art of Dreaming
You need to brood, to hold the day-world deep,
to creep through hallways and tunnels
in buildings you half remember.
Keep things in their rooms, hidden in hollows,
behind oaken doors and up stairways,
through arches and curtains,
where they become something else,
symbols of themselves, monsters and midwives.
You must step into the stream of the story,
find peace in the threads of the tale
that the smallest elf of your deepest self
is telling you, sifting and shifting images,
sliding pictures through your vision
like an old-time stereoscope.
Do not try to remember. Look sideways,
like you do at the Pleiades, which you can only see
when you look beside them, and never directly.
The memory of dreams requires just such a two-step,
a soft and sideways focus, peripheral.
Write them down. Don’t force sense upon them,
but let them unravel onto the page.