DURING SLEEP THE MIND IS OBLIGED TO RECEIVE AND BE AFFECTED BY IMPRESSIONS OF STIMULI FROM PARTS OF THE BODY AND FROM CHANGES IN THE BODY OF WHICH IT KNOWS NOTHING WHEN AWAKE
bacteria scribble the chest. infection scars.
scarabs. from the right side —
the righteous — skin pulls away
in soft clumps. vaginal, the gash it leaves. did you know,
says the dream-speak, ancient Greeks would lay
the dreamer on the stretched skin
of a sacrificed ram, rub her
in oils, frankincense, and myrrh, make her quodesh,
mostly holy, and watch over until she dreamt
her own cure? what’s missing here are
mystics who know how to translate
all this cryptic: bumps on the skin, a missive
of entrails. how alone we are in flesh’s
excess, every dreamer
her own oracle and oiler.
IN WHICH THE DAWN OF AWAKENING STEALS OVER THE MASS OF SLEEPING CELLS IN THE CEREBRAL CORTEX
blood fur dream or is it snow chatter
waking won’t wake dream chew
fat icing dream matter
what’s the fatter? the dream is the walk
the flesh chunks pillow should say the wake
is the dreaming but you are the dream
and the dream woman who comes in
rattling a metal tray a scalpel scalps to lay
the teeth on the pillow the woman here
with bone teeth and comes
and scalpels and while I sleep and dream
and not and do I wake to slice the fat
from the dream fragment but no still snow
in my mouth
Jules Gibbs‘s first book, Bliss Crisis, was published by The Sheep Meadow Press, and poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Verse Daily, The Antioch Review, Forklift Ohio, Plume Poetry, Salt Hill Journal, Gulf Coast, Better Magazine, Comstock Review, Margie, Spoon River Poetry Review, Barrow Street, H_NGM_N, and other places. Gibbs is the poetry editor for The Progressive Magazine, and for Corresponding Voices, a magazine of cross-cultural poetics based at Syracuse University (where Gibbs also teaches literature and creative writing).
