The Global Pages -> April 2004 -> Sleepwalking Near the Tigris

Sleepwalking Near the Tigris

 

This landscape I wander feels mined               

 

                                                            with dangers


far beyond my seeing, yet strangely

 

                        familiar in its unfamiliarity:

below me there is nothing at all (and this, somehow,

 

 

appears the least unreal)

 

as I wander, wrapped

 

                                    in the dream’s shroud

 

weeping and unable to be consoled –

 

even my fingertips grieving as they reach for the words,
beacons of meaning meant to reassure, now winking their inconstancy
in this deceptive dark where uncertainty is the polestar,
where all I would know or believe has become chimerical
where earnest charlatans in dove-grey suits make covenants on blood already spilt,
cast lots for the pottage of their children


                                               as I move, reaching

 

through emptiness now weighted with my weeping
shifting images re-form in sooty symbols that repulse, obscure
the honeyed promises grown smudged and faint
again I strain to glimpse the shape of truth, to thrill at the weight

 

of substance in the empty cup of my palm

 

and know the felicity of meaning                    secured

 

like a virgin’s sacred dowry in my heart

but everything                                     drifts

 

elusive as the borealis         

always                          just beyond

 

my piteous grasp – and this is my sadness –

when I am close enough to almost clasp the tantalizing light

 

it dims                         dissolves

  

in pale and plumy wraiths
a swaddling fog that so distorts my vision now

 

the cloud I see assuming such a monstrous shape

 

persuades me that mere waking           will never assuage

 

such sadness

 

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A poem by

Teddy Norris

SCC English
 

 
 

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This page updated 04/16/2004