Dream within a dream

So this is the new year / and I don't feel any different

The temperature rose from a wintry twenty into a rainy upper-forties. Driving back from the store, the fog was lifting from the earth and hovering at knee-height (graveyard-high) over the snow, and the pink-orange glow from the street lamps illuminated islands of crystal cloud. Between the pockets of illuminated fog, the snow was beautiful in the twilight, a hue of blue I cannot hope to describe, so beautiful I found myself sighing.
No footsteps marred the transcendent beauty of the frosted hillscape, and so the perfect blue receded into the trees and foothills on the outskirts of town like a journey of unanswered paths.
Here it is, where it all always begins, with some thread and sewing pins, and an inquisitive heart.
If you never walk where there are no tracks, is it your own life you are living?

I continued with my research into Elizabeth Bishop, today, and added Ted Kooser onto my poets list. I enjoy Ted Kooser's reminisce and the surrealist manner in which he draws together dissimilar objects into a cohesive dream. Elizabeth Bishop is also interesting, as though she's deliberately dumbed down the emotional window of her poetry so that each poem becomes a mystery, a delight in dancing shadows and light as the reader attempts to decipher what it was like being she, and what she believed, to draw such marvelous words.

Can a cloud-covered sky be so impossibly pretty, it steals your breath away? yes

I do feel different, though; I do. I feel abloom, like an Edgar Allen Poe love poem to life and being, but not this one


Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
~Edgar Allen Poe


You cannot clasp in tighter grasp the grains of golden sand - though how beautiful they look as chaff on the golden wind? The final night of this grain - fly gently into the wind, oh dream within a dream.