Read Ebook: The House of Sleep by Bartlett Elizabeth Bartlett Paul Alexander Illustrator

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Ebook has 403 lines and 9045 words, and 9 pages

O wanderer with my lamp, how dim grows the light.

Flying effortlessly I escape gravity

And seaborne, breathe through gills to swim past coral isles

Where I emerge on shores that climb up ancient roads.

Always, my origins enact some past within

Recalling elements of former existence.

Save two, that I renounce: bloodrust fire, fleshtorn ground.

Here I need no clock to tell me what time it is.

The day, season, year conform to no calendar.

No compass or map points my route or direction.

Sensation is all: the shape and sound of feeling.

I learn what I think by choice of symbols, meanings.

I invent my world as much as it invents me.

A baton like a pendulum swings back and forth.

Across the universe it moves in perfect time

Leading an orchestra of stars through measured space.

A score arranged with such grandeur, I merely hear

Its echoes through the walls of sleep-- how faint, how far

While my heart beats to the rhythm of earth's passage.

The twelve hours of the night are paths between the stars.

Whichever one you take leads to this centered house

If you speak the password to those who guard the gates.

You must not look at them or touch them on the way

Lest you be left alone and hear the triple bark.

For the rest, safe journey and sweet dreams until dawn.

How the bedtime refrain still echoes through the house:

"Good night, sweet dreams, see you tomorrow." Was it wish

Or something more substantial for child to sleep on

Like a pillow filled throughout the night with promise?

Which was kept and shall be kept in years yet to come

When all the yesterdays that made me, wake at dawn.

In genesis the dream began and came to life

And parting the sea from dry land, mother from child

Gave image its own reflection by day and night

But kept the sleeping and waking for seem and like

That the timeless and undying remain in-sight.

Our dreamscape is a Mil Cumbres across the years.

Peak after peak they rise like crests above a sea

In which we plunge, swim, dive and drown beneath each wave.

Yet breath returns and eyes grow clear from time to time

As all stands still, becalmed, at rest, and we can see

There, where we were. Here, where we are. How far. Which way.

It was a garden of people at all seasons.

I saw hands at work everywhere, none of them still.

Some were planting new souls in the fresh earth.

Others went about the weeding, pruning, hoeing

Their baskets filled with human plants of every kind.

While leaves, endless leaves kept falling all around me.

Among the Joshua trees, I saw a stone cross

Both claiming world salvation from brush, sand and thorn

While I stood on a mountain, waiting for the ark

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