DREAMS ARE HELMETS

Anodynes exist, the star whose height’s unknown although his worth be taken delivered
in Australian or Lady Macbeth dashing kid from pap. All goes to plaids as honestly revealing
weave. Three thimbles on a plain serviette conceal a dried pea. The cat chasing
mouse in the museum is anatomy, like a fleeced fish. The painter lifts his arm to paint,
reaching and Dickens through the area window applies labels to mustardcolored clay
bottles you know from the title have blacking in. That Briton not Updike or
Thwaite rejoiced at cinders edging out flowers, intelligible posture perhaps too merely a negative. Bach
with his sons like Russian dolls may have died hollow as Keats’s chest cavity, these
deathbed moments not when vocation came in, was (Newman) assented to. One’s ken
is a din, his Nightingale now a film of people reading it. What is a taste for verse like.
Heart imagined in the celastic rhino eighteen feet high would squeeze or wring, become brain
and Rodin could be sculpted worrying where the heart was, curved like a cashew over an
imagined chest, celle qui fut witch sitting not hunched at all, shriveled but game, Fortunate fourhorned
deer browse on a pink granite base like a viol reflected, a greenstone piglike beast above.
The planet with its metal, color, musical note or mode, food and (very controversial) sign scratched
on vellum in the pommel, hearty and intent face or pale one, rhomboid cut from potato so like a jade seal
to look on. Charles and Mary Lamb hung Hogarth’s startled cats and dipsoid rooms
and Tenniel did the Alice drawings first in pencil.
Flat lawns with fireflies in are magical enough one thinks but last night’s moon through tree branches
was Curse of the Demon throwing light coming at you, Coleridge’s pale face caught
or through brambles his insistence startling as wings on something.

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