Pharaoh dreams.
I fell totally in love with
someone I met in my sleep.
I walk up
and down Main Beach
scouring the umbrellas and bodies
looking for
an idea, a notion, a word
that’s on the tip of the tongue
(you corrected my mispronunciation
but it’s lost to me forever — I’m a dejected
lover condemned to eternal forgetfulness).
You’re all
over town
without spreading yourself thin.
I have a fight with the next-door neighbor,
a guy I will always be at war with oneirically.
“Knock, knock!”
“Knock, Godammit!”
I open my mouth to fend this guy off.
The only way to survive
is to come out fighting,
making sure people are afraid.
I dream about your
house by Georgica Pond,
the flock of geese overhead,
Manhattan taxi drivers honking in
Park Avenue gridlock
outside the Racquet Club’s crypt
swept along the Viaduct
above Vanderbilt with the gray hulk of Grand Central
a looming animal.
I’ll show up,
petitioning empty-handed,
embarrassed in my underwear,
getting expelled.
It’s a free country.
You get kicked out,
fall apart
then pick up pieces.
Liberty does not survive a weak constitution.
Not who you said you were, the
hapless dreamer,
spawns yarns
yearning for things that never existed,
wanting to make up for days and years.
I start asking for pickles
in pop-up shops,
early morning,
margin call.
Every time I go to sleep
or nine times out of ten
I bet my bottom dollar
I’m going to continue where I
left off having a dream about
walking away in a huff
after getting into a fight
with that neighbor.
Francis Levy lives in Wainscott and Manhattan. His novel “The Wormhole Society” is just out, with a graphic novel version illustrated by Joseph Silver.