The river of dream

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B i r d s   O f   A   F e a t h e r

Swan Lake Iris Gardens

Sumter, South Carolina

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They’d only done what all along they’d come
intending to do. So they lay untouched by regret,
after. The combined light and shadow of passing
cars stutter-shifted across the walls the way,
in summer,

the night moths used to, softly
sandbagging the river of dream against dream’s
return ... Listen, it’s not like I don’t get it about
suffering being relative -- I get it. Not so much
the traces of ice on the surface of four days’
worth of rainwater in a stone urn, for example,
but how, past the ice,

 
through the water beneath it,
you can see the leaves -- sycamore -- where they fell
unnoticed. Now they look suspended, like heroes
inside the myth heroes seem bent on making
from the myth of themselves; or like sunlight, in fog.

= Carl Phillips =

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Happy Thursday