Two more.
Waking at Dusk From a Nap, this poem is called.
If you've done that, you'll recall a moment of confusion.
You look out the window.
The clock would say, for example, 6 o'clock.
It's either dusk or dawn, you have no idea which.
So this could even be accompanied
by not knowing where you are.
But just as you move--
[SNAPS FINGERS]
In that first moments of consciousness out of sleep,
you're not-- you don't know where you are in time.
You don't know where you are in space.
And that pretty much puts you adrift in terms
of knowing where you are.
And yet rapidly somehow, we regather
whatever information is necessary to know where we are.
That's all that happens in this poem in terms
of direct and dramatic action.
It has a pretty slow plot.
But there are many other things that happen to it.
Waking at dusk from a nap.
In the years that passed through an afternoon's dream,
like tape that fast forward, there are syllables somehow
in the waterfall.
And in the dream I hear them each clearly.
A classroom of children reciting their names.
I am not in the dream.
It's as if I am the dream.
The dream in which such distinctions go without saying,
and in which a confusion I may soon have--
did I wake at dawn or dusk--
seems anticipated.
A strand of stars goes by, like elephants spliced trunk to tail
in children's books or ivory carvings.
And the dream won't say if they're through for the night,
or amiably headed for work.
And the dream and once, I remember,
it seemed I was the dream.
The dream tilts up to pour me out.
For an instant when I wake there's
a whir, perhaps of props and stagehands.
And a laggard star scrambles over the transom.
Then the grainy world with its swirls and lesions,
its puckering dusk light, its dimming patina, its used
and casual beauty, reassembles itself exactly.
And I climb down from bed, gather my spilled book
from the floor, and watch the lights
come on in the valley like bright type being
set in another language.