They sleep as the noise of life mutes

and who knows how they lie down

or company they keep, or

what borderless countries nest inside the jumbled brain.

They each gather secrets like

food for the famished, markers for mapping.

They stir a netherworld with gasps,

fingers clutching sheets, mouths innocent.

I have gotten close to them

out there where we meet. Dream passersby.

Masses that crowd nebulous snowy back roads.

By a lapis sea circling crystalline mountains.

In the markets, tiny stalls billowing

with beauty and oddities, our hands happy.

Streets like puzzles. The night a hologram.

But fights happen there, too:

the free and cunning grab power

while unfree bloodied give it up as

human agency runs out of steam.

Even the brave sometimes cannot find

a door to an ancient portal to newer worlds

and fall, rise, fall. No one is always heroic.

Still, we sleep on and float and wrestle,

half-wake with stories unraveling.

And yet there remain beyond the blue deep

a trillion unknown pulsars,

magnetized, radiating, spinning.

And so why not angels keeping guard,

a glowing personage for everyone? or more?

Inside the opalescence I search is a beacon

like a pulsar-guardian

and fear drops away with gravity

so life which is love is not forsaken

or blasted or misread or forgotten.

It lives. It acts. It liberates as

I travel without thinking, with less pain,

and minus remembrance of every loss.

So it may be for all other sleepers,

though some do forget upon rising,

knowledge like a flaming flower gone to ash.

Still, the open passage of dawn to day

takes us back into soft and jagged silences,

into whorls of talk, a measure of longing.

We walk. We talk.

Our eyes frame one another,

we nod and wonder:

who was that, what did I recognize?

An eternal memory of the

aging and young, well and lame,

lost and found, those who cannot bear

or bother to look up– yet sense kinship like

the telling energy of the animate.

And this: we each are one more link to God,

our lives a chalice for sacredness.

You doubt? I believe doubly.

Is it, you say, a dream that carries me off…

or is it a necessary truth recalled?

The universe is made of such potent things.

We may reclaim them here, now.