From Maine to Japan

 I would like to watch you sleeping,
 which may not happen.
 I would like to watch you,
 sleeping. I would like to sleep
 with you, to enter
 your sleep as its smooth dark wave
 slides over my head

 and walk with you through that lucent
 wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
 with its watery sun & three moons
 towards the cave where you must descend,
 towards your worst fear

 I would like to give you the silver
 branch, the small white flower, the one
 word that will protect you
 from the grief at the center
 of your dream, from the grief
 at the center. I would like to follow
 you up the long stairway
 again & become
 the boat that would row you back
 carefully, a flame
 in two cupped hands
 to where your body lies
 beside me, and you enter
 it as easily as breathing in

 I would like to be the air
 that inhabits you for a moment
 only. I would like to be that unnoticed
 & that necessary.

----

That's William Blake's drawing of Virgil watching Dante and Statius sleep as they make their way toward Purgatory
in The Inferno.  I know nothing at all about Statius, although Wikipedia tells me he is the character with the fourth-
largest amount of time in the Infero, after Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice.  He was apparently another poet who Dante
meets on the way.

I went looking for a more traditional image of couples watching each other sleep, but was struck by the way Blake's
visionary, dreamy art fits the mythological overtones of Atwood's poem, which brings The 12 Dancing Princesses
and Orpheus' descent into Hades to mind for me.

Watching someone lost in dreams which you can't share is usually a melancholy image--Atwood adds another layer
to it by having the narrator long for even that level of bittersweet intimacy with the beloved.

Labels: poetry

// posted by Jennifer @ 11:01 AM