DREAM OF A SOAPHOUSE IN A CEMETERY AMONG FIELDS

Stones have grown those green-brown beards
Concealing fictions etched on chins
  And scarred-on dates that steam obscurely
In my dreaming. In my dreaming, singing
To shed a disclaimed instinct,
  I’m pheasant, owl, goldfinch—
And lines I would dispart with.
 
  Dank as wells in a room called Night,
Windows thick with grease and mist,
  Alive in the shed where we boil the lye
While the fog a song—is it song?—enlists
A wail over acres. I’m the green
Of fields the mind must be 
To tune a farmer’s evening theme,
 

  Bare as the lightbulb, those flickers and surges
And the filament that beams across it, 
  Its span a rallied urge’s 
Catenary line, ours against the losses,
As when the knees of land anticipate  
  What a city-bordered bay—
What a bridge—instates.