We were woken too early, before the moths had died in the streets,
when buds had barely hardened in the frost, when stars are
hurtful
and famished. They took us through gardens and past the
halls
where once we had lingered, past the houses and doused
markets.
Our footsteps echoed back like iron. Of course we were
frightened,
that was a given, of course we remembered photographs we had
studied
that then had nothing to do with us. The empty light of
morning
made anything seem possible, even freedom, even God. We
stumbled
on familiar roads, and everything turned away from us,
lamp-posts, windows, signs. They weren’t ours any longer.
Even the air
greeted us differently, pinching our skin to wake us from
its dreams.
*
Words of course were beyond us. They were what killed us
to begin with. They were taken away from the mouths that
loved them
and given to men who worked their sorceries in distant
cities,
who said that difficult things were simple now and that
simple things
no longer existed. It was hard to find our way, we
understood
the tender magic of hands, we knew the magic of things not
spoken,
but this was a trick we couldn’t grasp. It lifted the world
in a clump of glass
and when everything came back down the streets had vanished.
In their places were shoes and clotting puddles and sparking
wires
and holes and bricks and other things that words have no
words for
and that silence swelling the noise until you can’t hear
anything at all.
*
It’s said that the dead don’t dream, but I dream of flowers.
I could dream so many flowers – lilies like golden snow on
water,
hyacinths the colours of summer evenings or those amaranths
they call
love-lies-bleeding. I dream of none of those. I dream
instead
of wind-blown roses that grew in our shabby yard, of daisies
glimpsed through the kitchen window, of marigolds that
glowed
through nets of weed. But most of all, I dream of red
anemones
that never grew in my garden. They rise on slender stalks,
their seven-petalled heads bobbing and weaving in the wind.
Wind-flowers, Pliny called them, because they open only in
the wind,
and the wind scatters their petals over every waste in the
world.
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