Sleep (Dali) and The Eye of Light, Sonnets #185 and #184

Sleep (Dali), Sonnet #185

Asleep, awake, the mind is all there is,
Or so our waking minds would have us think.
Asleep, it quails before its own image.
In crepuscule, without the drum and fizz
Of coherent ideas, or evil's stink,
It cannot muster love, regret, or rage.
It shivers, blanketed, fetal, offstage:
"But what a monstrously huge I I am!
I span vast deserts and dwarf whole cities.
I am all ego and all else is sham,
Imagined vanity no man pities.”
A cripple on crutches, it mutters, "damn."
The world fades from gray to color to gray;
We're asleep and awake, facing the day.

The Eye of Light, Sonnet #184

The eye of light is a spectrum of irises
With two dilated pupils, like binary stars,
Slightly blind, in need of Man's eyeglasses,
Its cornea a matting of translucent scars.
Light is a god, as consciousness is a god,
Illuminations we require to survive,
And each is useless, like a cracked divining rod,
Without the bird in flight or a bee-boiling hive.
The eye-beam that threw a rainbow on my ceiling
The sun sent minutes ago to find a prism,
Like the brain turns sensation into feeling,
Near purity, a benign astigmatism.
A man is godly then, in part, without being
A god, though he can often go blind with seeing.

Light

A beam of light cutting the skin of space
travels at the speed of time to the beginning,
the end of things, seeing everything between,

without being seen.

Or a single photon released into a sphere
lined with silver, instantaneously covering
all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,

as if someone might see.

It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,
a point on a continuum proliferating one day
to saturate the universe with something better

than heat, light, matter.

It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor
at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter
shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.

It is promiscuous,

infecting its neighbors, or looking to.
It stretches across the sky like an eyelid
and proliferates color like a drug dream.

It splits the prism

into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,
blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white;
it is nothing at all—until it strikes something.