On Waking From a Dream of Conversing with Several Emerald Maggots

There may be certain thick somatic slow-downs in the hibernation
we unconsciously each deeply undergo in winter, but imagination
never sleeps or goes away –
it leaps, grows creepy, flows into the sway

of day- and night-dreams onto bright-lit secret psychic stages –
rages
hard against all lesser instincts and conventional parameters:
sinks and disinters –

beyond the range
of everything we’d ever breezily dismissed as strange –
the most unnerving plays and ways it can to grasp the hugely odd –
as if it thought that doing so might offer shocking evidence of God.

Because it never quite accomplishes this end,
we’re just bewildered by its catalogue of hiss and toot and bend,
implausibilities and mumbled also-ran’s –
the not-quite-there’s that turn a woman or a man’s

experience of consciousness into a vast and sticky mess –
miserably failing every self-imposed forced folly of a test –
promising illumination in its blast and blurt and quiver
that quite clearly it cannot deliver.

But ah, the Caravaggio dramatic light
and shadow on the sight
of all those eloquent green-jeweled bugs!
One sighs, and shrugs.

.