Common-Law Kundalini
--Rodney Jones 

A sudden loving settles into your own weight . . .
click, then roll over onto your back
and you are there above yourself, 

the human spirit in full cloud-drift,
a lust fieldstripped to eye and ambition
which moves through walls and doors 

and rises to the carnival of looking down
with no power but that of seeing
all of it momentarily unchangeable: 

the shadow-tinseled moonlit fields
and silvery water towers on stilts,
the vole in the unblinking talon of the owl. 

Even better, asleep, in dream-buoyancy,
I have seen more than I ever saw
pretzel-munching in some cloud valley 

thirty thousand feet above the sorghum.
Once a pelican stopped to question me.
Once my friend Herbert McAbee 

bumped into me out of the mist
with a talking sheep under his arm.
Often I have achieved much in basketball, 

for many dream flights launched
from the magic floor of some actual gym
where old men smoked by a potbellied stove, 

but removed from time, unblocked,
and watched by sweethearts, cheered,
I rose and dunked and hovered 

with fear's iodine in my throat.
When I am up there, it is not poetry.
In the dream's onliness, it feels 

wingless, bird-elegant, experimental,
requiring the decisionless decision-
making of dreams. But somehow, 

why do I do this if not for the freedom?
Sometimes I wish I had never heard
of the name of Sigmund Freud.

[via blackbird]