Lost Love

“The only thing we do not find [in dreams] is what can to some extent reconcile an educated man to life—scientific and artistic enjoyment.”

~Eduard von Hartmann (quoted in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams)

“He’s dreaming of his lost love;

A goat with no horns, hooves, and hide.”

~Abayomi Animaschaun, “Anecdote of a Goat”

Just the other day I heard tell

of an earless goat.

Just two holes in his head

you could see straight through to the other side.

Cost five bucks but I had to

see for myself.

The goat held still

well enough, and I looked

as through a kaleidoscope

and saw the crystalline fragments

of colors in the pokeberry and bramble

lining the fence on the far side of the goat.

And as the scope turned

the coruscant pieces

wended their way into a new

shape, the form of some past

life—or some inverted version

of this one.  In the summer heat

of the open field

I felt the grass gather around me

and rise up through the cleft

in my feet.  I could smell

the familiar stench of beasts

like it was part of me,

like everything I gathered into myself—

the great hoard of vines,

of briars and berries,

thistle and grape leaves

and amorous imaginings—

was the ample fortunes of animal dreams.

What great prophet could boast

visions from the ears of a goat?

Not kneeling before green fire

in the mouth of a cave,

nor fasting in the adyton,

a farmer can glory in great divinations

knowing only that the substance

of the dreams of beasts is perpetual consumption.

Consumption of art and science

reconciles man to life

but not the life of dreams and something

beyond life, the lost love of the intangible.

Cassandra’s curse was never to be believed,

but mine is the terror of not saying

anything worth believing.

The nightmare of myopia

is that the goat’s dreams

are vaster than my own.