Self and Dream Self

–Les Murray

Routines of decaying time

fade, and your waking life

gets laborious as science.

You huddle in, becoming

the deathless younger self

who will survive your dreams

and vanish in surviving.

Dream brings on its story

at the pace of drift

in twilight, sunless color,

its settings are believed,

a library of wood shingles,

plain mythic furniture

vivid drone of talk,

yet few loves return:

trysts seem unkeepable.

Urgencies from your time

join with the browner suits

walking those arcades with you

but then you are apart,

aghast, beside the numberless

defiling down steep fence

into an imminence —

as in the ancient burrow

you, with an ever-changing cast,

survive deciding episodes

till you are dismissed

and a restart of tense

summons your waking size

out through shreds of story.