I thought I wrote, not a perfect but at least a good poem, one which began with a real moment of wakening, with a line not perfect but still worth scribbling down.
I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
‘
Behind it lay an amorphous shifting shape of sound—like the phantom sounds which Mandelstam put to the beginning of a poem.
The next morning, actually May Day, there was more than a sonic shape. Actual words began to fill in. My job was to work with them.
I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
I couldn’t tell
The form into which it fell
Emptied of words, only a shape
Triolet, pantoum, villanellea
Or this
I dreamed I wrote a perfect line.
Morning come, it was erased.
Emptied of words, but a shape
of sound, unknown…
Pantoum, triolet, villanelle…
Finally, the next morning, it fell together. So I thought.
I dreamed I wrote a perfect line
Morning come, it was erased.
All that sleep time gone to waste.
Was it by hap or by design?
To be continued …