DREAMS OF EPHEMERA

I woke today before the dawn after an erotica alpha-style dream of a lesbian duo.
I considered whether dreams are ephemeral
or whether they provide us with visions – true angelic visions of eternity.
Then I realized I held ephemera in my hand – that they emanated from my steaming bowl of coffee,
from the pores of the trees and grass and snow and dripped from the tree tops.
Truth is, the phrase dreams of ephemera came to me during the short period between sleep and wake,
from some outlying brain signal, seemingly out of thin air.
I wanted to incorporate it into my writing, whether through a title or a deduction of logic.
I wanted rather to avoid cryptic writing and be as honest as possible – utmost honesty.

My hands smell like stale cigars in the supra-alive morning.
The mildew dampness wafts from the forest floor,
overnight rain slowly gutters itself onto the ground,
peace of the drizzle is broken by the clangor of yelping birds,
one close to me falls silent, but those a few hundred yards away chirp themselves hoarse.
The sky is an immeasurable white wall of cloud.
because of the low hanging mist supersaturated
hanging, waiting to drop.
Mountain laurel ornamental plants sit on the deck to my left,
posies to my west, lily pad shaped heart blade plant and knivy exotic crimson dreadlocked plant to my northwest,
tomato plants in the developing stage silhouetted by trestles to my north,
behind the deck trestles a lilac bush,
to the northeast, Jake’s ashes are buried below a Norway maple tree at the very edge of the proscenium garden.
Protruding from the front gravelly brick walkway of the house façade,
gutters clean, holes patched in the driveway fabric, souls holy, termited woodpecked stump amidst oak giants,
aspens, maps approaching sunlight disband the mist,
Caribbean ocean clear water in perfect setting fashion
soothes Proust to sleep in the veritable goldmine of the Normandy coast at 10 in the morning –
it’s not 10 yet, but the great writer still has some malady.

We’re approaching daybreak, and the forest fills with background punctured light.
Now the fog is a dense forest of mist – an abyss of imagination,
gorgefuls of empty hollow extending horizontally in outmoded wonder –
the mist of Morocco, the fantasy London city, the bicycle tread in Amsterdam,
Louverousell, France lives an unutterable existence inside a turned boat with thoughts hidden in a veil of secrecy.
I’ll have to haul the cut branches away from the Chinese chestnut that I clipped yesterday.
The ice storm of 2005 split the trees in two, and the branches I trimmed have spontaneously grown back.
Karma has a way of biting you in the ass sometimes.

Snakes come out of wicker basket ribbons,
forest ephemera transform into rodent-sized beasts,
light streaks across the visual perception, all phantasmagoria –
all haunting momentary lapses of concentration drift.
O hallowed perception! Troika, ennui, clandestine moist beads bespeckling a spider web,
attached to the death gathering skylight blowing cloud smoke and showing sky-blue cream.
All time has ended! There’s only ephemera and the clock-tick of bird chirps,
birds sound in Doppler effect culmination and fly south
molten ash streams and evaporates in the high-sky.
Nuclear steam congeals then separates, all nature picks up on the stale smell of my spirit,
phantom pieces, Death, wandering gloom, hurting stomach drop and want of coffee grounds,
appetite suppress on the death bed canvas, starved and supple,
a morning flight airliner overhead, jets in one-minute intervals over the Hudson never gotten tired of,

Sunlight golden in the emblemed East, a white-gold tincture, gold-rimmed edible sunrise over the forest florets
faded a bit at intervals, blocked by catalpa leaves, but still filtering through skyscraper heights of vision,
chromosphere vision emanates from the atmosphere – explain all this outlying color?
Van Gogh pins oaks below the stark sky with a bruised dark-complexioned through-light of punctuated hoar-sky,
brooding dimension trees with smoky branches,
billows of smoke pouring from my hypothalamus, acres of forest in my hippocampus,
dense canopy in my sinuses cured only by fresh smell of lifting dew point forest detritus.
Handy with the pen today trying to come up with words, words with iron ore in them
fissured out of the San Andreas fault lines running in between Oakland and the hallway of a dormitory,

The Richter storms of earthquake weather, magma fronts and dynamos of iceberg floes,
diamond platforms, crystal debris, augmented waves, tsunamis, frigid –
Norman Mailer and Orwell admonish the climate crisis.
From my vantage point, the forest smells sweeter than ever – no acid rain where I sit
despite Great Wolf grease pollution, Aventis-Pasteur cover up, sulfur and biological wastes
trickling into the Tobyhanna river, oil spills on the Nova Scotia coastline,
exploding furnaces in Australia, natural gas infused torches on the thicket mountains,
plateaus hiked, Ozarks, dust bowls, prairie, plains regions, rhombus contours,
Chilean hills, throbbing calves, bejeweled rainwater, surrealistic impressions, the moon-brain, star frenzy,
Corso on a Minnesota lakefront, mottled yarn blanket, screened breeze flowing in from the Great Lakes,
sympathetic, ethereal, healing, Taoist life energy embalming the declining spirit.

Hidden in the corridor – magnetic pressure in synapsed pleasure,
cartwheels of lightning from attracted rods, glaciers dripping from poles,
drift scrape, footprint lakes, Amsterdam canals, plump ankle-siphoned bays,
perforated ground water, veined Death Valley, heated clays in the artistic oven,
Promethean casks, wandering laurels, empiric dawns, blaring symphonies, discord, appearing sun,
wall light and tire quick, miracle food of nature, ambrosial dawn!
Greek, feta, beta, Xanadu sunrise, fantastic, florid, Florida orange peeled dawn light,
exploding retina, wrinkled abyss reflects shadows in yellow from the corona flashbulb gone as phantoms in minutes,
Wall play on wood, impressed, tungsten, burning glow, piled lawns, sphere of grandeur and illusion,
8 minutes time, electromagnetic force field.
The sunlight is finally here to illuminate our shadows,
dry our paranoia, evaporate our monsters, renew our sanity and heartbreak,
lovelorn lacklove loinpain libido, nocturnal sunrise of the world’s page,
sublime sounds of wing-ed insects frittering across the field of vision awakened by the dry sun, stinging my forehead.