Peril-ology

Like a lollipop, mid-suck, the word evolves
and lobs and tumbles sweetly on my dreaming
tongue: becomes a gleaming rung of my
ascending ladder back to wakeful sentience –
then insists on quick acknowledgment: I snap
the dowel off before quite doffing all the rest
of raggy sleepiness, install it like a towel

rack upon which this day’s dress might hang:
I am a perilologist – my dreamlife makes this
sure: for every crisis I am set I always find
the cure. Perilology, it seems, requires
loving every bang and mess, shoving each
Medusa-squirming tress into a flow: making
obdurately red cessations turn to green and go.

As a perilologist, I find that I can swim through tar:
blizzards, fogs and hailstorms turn out not
to be exactly what, awake, one thinks they are.
With somnolent assuredness, I wield my
muscled soul, and once again knit shattered
bits of universe: re-coalesce a blessèd whole.
Ah, lessons of the deep! Thank God for sleep.



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