The Book of Dreams

--Andrea Jurjević

I fall asleep under the tremolo voice box of the moon

I fall asleep under the scratched cymbal of the moon

The moon that’s the stone lodged in the throat of the night

The night so exiled it wants to find its way back home

I dream about the tough heel of a walnut roll from 1975

And sharing its sweet December bits with a clan of crows

I dream about a crow that’s my imaginary older brother

And a girl dance-swaying her bovine hips into widowhood

I dream of sun shooting itself up between the sharp shanks of hills

Down the ravine a woeful snake rent with a blunt fish knife

I dream of pouring woe into mugs and topping it with red wine

The river man that’s parched and all I have is that wine

In a dream I’m lying on a salamander-sleek slab inside a cave

Beside a skinless drum simmering with fat carp

The fish leaping in and out of the stew are soldiers in a foxhole

In a dream my love stirs that stew with long white oars

I have a native tongue and I grow a foreign one too

I have a need for closed captions when I talk to people

I have no feelings about god and a shipyard of suspicions about men

I also have rooms filled with clocks riffing in double time

I have a longing for the coiling shadows of cypresses

And a pull toward the soft gray hook of the moon

I have memory drawers filled with sweet chicory root

A pull to the purple lip of the sea and its theremin breath

In a naked dream I fall on the dock mum as cargo

Beg the rain to drop song on the pillows of my palms

The moon slips away like a pearly soap bubble

A glistening nipple pulled from a wet mouth

I winter in that waver

My bones are oars and within me a shady lady rows

I wake seasick from the sloshing in my veins

In another country I’m rain