We're all obsessive scholars, like Professor Blok
in A Billion Days Of Earth; we gnaw at our
little worlds obscure.
Our dogs know our pet obsessions; greet
canine kin with "mushroom", "metamorphic", or
at most, two jargon words. Never more than two.
None of us have more
Core, so this laconic dogtalk limns us all too well.
Alarming just how circumscribed we are! We try
to force our pets to talk with us, converse. But no.
Dogs all shun us
...humans? Are we? No. We're creatures too!
Another sort--furred quadrupeds, but tall, and
Oh, so professorial.
We are hungry, hungry, in a dead-end valley.
Jade grass, flowers by the creek; Eden to the eye,
but a scowling bunny called a Jare put up a sign:
ALL FOOD RESERVED FOR THE ERTHEDNI
ERTHEDNI's a living God (or Sheen); a superjare.
Cultist rabbit-mobs enforce their holy writ.
By FOOD the pious mean even creek and air!
Garden for us all, yet we slow-starve in it.
Desperate we scholars lope toward the DOOR
at valleymouth. Headfirst down the Stair!
A zoo of academic beasts well-tumble, pour
Out of Erthedni's vale.
Emerge in a sea-cave. Shimmer blue. We're caged
Inside a hollow Monolith infinitely pierced;
A oval sieve of pinholes, like a tea-ball of stone;
Or that Old Celestial Sphere, God-prick'd with star
Portals raining down transcendent Light.
Air slips in too, dissolved. Non-bubble form.
A Friend Aquatic fears I'll drown down here,
but I can (barely) breathe sans gear--IF I hover near
the Holy Wall. I'm astonished too. "It's because I am
a relative to Turtles" I explain, "called a Tare."
WAVES up the cave-gullet pound brine to foam;
Air-bubbles seep, dissolve. Breathe. Breathe on.
The dream-scene shifts. Breathe easy. For now I am
a Merman, lazing in a pool below a lacy Fall,
Refreshed by spray and rainbows. A Fran,
(a Water-Earth-Mother) is fishbowled too. Everyone
expects us to make love, but I have the wrong
body for her green kind, so I coil round
the Fran and hold her head up; she needs air.
Not lovers yet love. Deep friends.
There, bearable at last, my hard dream ends.
