Strong Dream (Paul Klee), Sonnets #471 and #472

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My Human Disguise.

















#471

I ask myself, who dreams the dream?

In real time “I” experience

Oddities and “life.” Like a beam

Flashed along a picket fence,

“I” find in each gap an event —

From where inside me was it sent?

“I” play a game of pool and lose.

“I” feel the loss, see the table.

Who changes the scene? “I” didn’t choose.

Now “I’m” gliding as if on a cable.

There is another I in the “I” —

Stage manager and audience.

It’s stronger than “I.” This dreaming eye

Sees “me” seeing the picket fence.

#472

He dreamed the sun devoured by the moon.

He dreamed the moon deflowered by the sun.

The stars blinked their tiny eyes at the ruin.

His slinging guitar became a shotgun

And with one blast picked off every star

Then turned back into a slinging guitar.

He took off his wings when he went to sleep.

They kept him as warm as the woolen sheep

Of old counting — that didn’t work at all.

So warm his feet and face had turned brick red,

He rode into a lukewarm waterfall

On a black mule, back as wide as a bed.

I saw all this through his closed eyes, not mine,

Yet he wrote this goggling, every line.