Dream

In the dream,
I struggled to untangle a string,
to find the end of it,
to recover and wind it neatly on a stick.
Helping me, a small boy and his friend,
a strong young man.
The string, which had been clean and dry,
was muddy and wet.
It ran through an old suitcase—wet and moldy,
(a gift to the boy from his friend).
It ran through a rock and past a rusted, collapsed truck,
(the kind they deliver oil in).
The young man, muscular and energetic,
welded a small piece in the front—
heedless that the back had collapsed.
(He would fix that later.)
As I mused about the young man,
I woke.

When we are young,
we wake and swim, as fish from the egg,
in an endless sea of time.
When we are old,
we wake and measure,
fathoming our place in the stilling sea—
listening for the edge.