Dream
One of those old, old-world
sort of church-wise libraries —
(high-ceilinged / vault-sealed / arch-vaulted.)
Striated spines or one
sort of corrugated mind —
(furrow-bound brow of the thinker. Leathery.)
And at most as many dust motes as mots, though
in window light hovers one, th’other, in covers —
(shutters.)
A tourist in short, I’m on tour with a sort of religious order
in which I’m impermitted from sitting with the elders
of it, its deep rituals all screened from me,
certain scriptures obnubilated from my viewing.
Then upon some inner structure, some splendid shed,
door open to what dark I don’t know, of what carved dark
wood I don’t know, I don’t know, I didn’t grow
up in places like this. (Oak, I suppose.)
I go inside alone and inside is
a woman from my hometown
who I had forgotten had died.
Is this her little ‘brary, then?
within the bigger where
every book is open, so
dangerously splayed open
like double-doors or casement windows pinned
to walls like wings under glass?
And a boy in the corner,
we whispered how we
played each other’s
cousins or lovers or simply each other
respectively on the British and American
versions of the same show on TV.
Lingering, this whisper elongs from his ear,
red tensile thread that sways
as I walk away from my mouth,
a murmur my tongue braids.
When I glance back, he’s become three.
(This thrills me.)
*
Where would I be
without my you
flipping me through —
a spine in splits, enwinged,
eclosing the part of me that’s always open.
*
The narrowed air, snake-like, traces
the invisible in labyrinthine slither, amazes
the puzzle-box locks
an empty room collects.
I run my fingers over the surface of my sleep,
hollow old hazel globe I know from home
oceans up deep under breathing
of the morpho’s lucid blue —
what efflittles by flying,
o unpinnd eyes.
Superlunar Daydream
When I go to Sleep,
when I go to She
in my wind-shirt’s weft with
my feather fetish, sylph-lifted, it
wafts my essence better to Dream:
the Book in the lap of my
Illiterate Queen.
(All thoughts flock in her fields
of the forbidden red-green.)
Within a robin’s shell-of-the-welkin
an adularia eyrie descends —
warp of its spectrum sheds from a heddle,
flashes like the face of an Actress —
as of Chasse
& Rassemble:
the Goddess who hunts the atmosphere,
her Husband
who gleans the moon.
Surely a Virgin, the strength of the unicorn
protrudes —
his hymn-milk skinning her lap.
The tongue of a kitten’s the sound of a feather:
this moondrifts
across a granite face aslip.
Some dove’s marbled voice scoons babbles
and adulations of iridescence.
I dawn on nothing firmer meant for me —
the deer run ruin through the heavens.
-
Originally from upstate New York, Chloe Bliss Snyder now writes poèmes de terre in Idaho, where she studies and teaches poetry at Boise State University. Some of her recent work has appeared in Mercury Firs, Tagvverk, Noir Sauna, Grotto, and Annulet. Her chapbook Ekho and Narkissos was published by the pamphlet series The Swan and its recording can be heard on PennSound.