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Ebook has 403 lines and 9045 words, and 9 pages
Illustrator: Paul Bartlett
THE HOUSE OF SLEEP
Elizabeth Bartlett
To Paul
When you gave me a painting of hammocks, I knew:
The dreamer tells the truth, the self awake does not.
For years I raged against the images you drew.
How they stared, gloomy shrouds, whenever I forgot.
To rest, be still--I swore that was a way of death.
Yet find more lives in sleep than I have years ahead.
THE HOUSE OF SLEEP
Elizabeth Bartlett
AUTOGRAPH EDITIONS
Colima, Mexico
Copyright 1975 by Elizabeth Bartlett
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book in whole or in part in any form.
First Edition
Acknowledgement: some of these poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly
Poems of Yes and No Behold This Dreamer Poetry Concerto It Takes Practice Not to Die Threads Selected Poems Twelve-Tone Poems
THE HOUSE OF SLEEP
It is a house with many doors, no two alike.
I am at home in all its rooms of time and place.
My changing person, gender, speech hold no surprise.
I know who I am in my sleep, behind my face.
If you ask which of them is false and which is true
Enter the house with me and call, I'll answer you.
Here inside the darkness, the eye of light opens
As mind travels inward to a fourth dimension.
There is no perspective of other or outside.
Both obverse and reverse are simultaneous
While past and present form a folding wave that flows
Now backward, then forward in one eternal dream.
I found it as a child, a house that was all mine
Where I could think and be whatever I believed.
Half of me stayed outside on guard, aware of spies
The inner self went free to wonder as it pleased.
Leaving the day behind, I came upon the night
And there I dreamed of things past all imagining.
Memory is no stranger in the house of sleep.
It comes as a visitor for a reunion.
If a private occasion, with the family
Or else with those forgotten who have long been gone.
The waiting house is ready for us to gather.
Together or separately our memories meet.
Waking in the night, I have wondered where I am
Knowing I have been away and not yet returned.
I lie still and wait between absence and presence
Conscious of being witness to my sleep and wake.
Here's body, inert, prepared to revert to clay.
O wanderer with my lamp, how dim grows the light.
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