Charles Alexander
To Dream, To Wake, To Gather, To Disperse
"To sleep, perchance to dream" — Hamlet
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on" — Prospero
I have had a most rare vision! I have had a dream -- past the wit of man to say what a dream it was" — Bottom
we dreamt a tapestry
or shroud in which every
text was sacred: we dreamt it,
we wove it, begged it
sing, then tore
it down
— Donna de la Perrière. from "Exegesis," in Works of Love & Terror
Donna de la Perrière invents/dreams a possibility of meaning, yet any human invention fails. Our ambition as well as our fragility pulls us and our works down. Yet such invention, fall, and response, is the ritual of our minds and bodies, and the failure, or "the rift," makes it so, and calls us again to dream, and again to pull down our vanities. Our bodies, after all, breathe only for a short time and space.
The poem moves toward cohesion (clever, difficult, hard-won), built on torn-down other cohesions, as our grown dreams may build on our pages torn from books we read as children. Each dream, each poem, at the same time invents anew, and stands as a palimpsest over the former, the dream somewhere in our mist, in our midst, is our midst.
We wake from the dream, and something dissolves, falls into darkness, or into complacency. Something takes away and sometimes escapes the ticking self. Dreaming, waking, we crash into a place "called never." But in all the dreams, all the poems, we flash and breathe, at least totteringly, in and through the dream and the loss of dream — "at night we sleep and dream of rock walls sliding, then struggle to wake in bright, tottering places."
Works of Love & Terror creates a world of such imagining and of such dissolution an falling. Psychically and physically, de la Perrière includes us in her poems' journey, one that poses and takes away a body, even through the empty spaces that inhabit the poem "First Love," which exposes the bulk of the page as that space, empty before us (but is blankness empty?), an uninhabited body we are in process of creating through pain, through the impossibility of containment, of existence.
She can't imagine how to impose narrative structure on this.
As with the dream, the only answer may be to leave the space empty, to "put it away."
Then again, a daydream may link our beings, past, present, and future, as it fills the heart ("and my heart a filled silence"), as a life finds itself as a continuity, though amid different weather and stars.
Life falls back upon us, a spillage, when all we have are "bodies spanning / out," when a loved friend's death smudges us, marks us as being present, not dispersed, not blown away, rather with other presences "blowing back into us."
Be warned, and we are warned, de la Perrière signs to us, provides awareness, constantly, of our (life's, meaning's, coherency's) "dispersal, a siren bursting / a warning as piercing as God." While warned and dispersed, though, we also constitute the very atoms which disperse, the very sounds in which we hear the ocean, the very poems which in de la Perrière's words fall to our ears and rise "over the ridge like a troop of fixed stars."
These poems cast infinity, a net just wide enough.
note: all quotations, other than the epigraphs, are from Donna de la Perrière, Works of Love & Terror. Talisman House Publishers, 2019.
"To sleep, perchance to dream" — Hamlet
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on" — Prospero
I have had a most rare vision! I have had a dream -- past the wit of man to say what a dream it was" — Bottom
we dreamt a tapestry
or shroud in which every
text was sacred: we dreamt it,
we wove it, begged it
sing, then tore
it down
— Donna de la Perrière. from "Exegesis," in Works of Love & Terror
Donna de la Perrière invents/dreams a possibility of meaning, yet any human invention fails. Our ambition as well as our fragility pulls us and our works down. Yet such invention, fall, and response, is the ritual of our minds and bodies, and the failure, or "the rift," makes it so, and calls us again to dream, and again to pull down our vanities. Our bodies, after all, breathe only for a short time and space.
The poem moves toward cohesion (clever, difficult, hard-won), built on torn-down other cohesions, as our grown dreams may build on our pages torn from books we read as children. Each dream, each poem, at the same time invents anew, and stands as a palimpsest over the former, the dream somewhere in our mist, in our midst, is our midst.
We wake from the dream, and something dissolves, falls into darkness, or into complacency. Something takes away and sometimes escapes the ticking self. Dreaming, waking, we crash into a place "called never." But in all the dreams, all the poems, we flash and breathe, at least totteringly, in and through the dream and the loss of dream — "at night we sleep and dream of rock walls sliding, then struggle to wake in bright, tottering places."
Works of Love & Terror creates a world of such imagining and of such dissolution an falling. Psychically and physically, de la Perrière includes us in her poems' journey, one that poses and takes away a body, even through the empty spaces that inhabit the poem "First Love," which exposes the bulk of the page as that space, empty before us (but is blankness empty?), an uninhabited body we are in process of creating through pain, through the impossibility of containment, of existence.
She can't imagine how to impose narrative structure on this.
As with the dream, the only answer may be to leave the space empty, to "put it away."
Then again, a daydream may link our beings, past, present, and future, as it fills the heart ("and my heart a filled silence"), as a life finds itself as a continuity, though amid different weather and stars.
Life falls back upon us, a spillage, when all we have are "bodies spanning / out," when a loved friend's death smudges us, marks us as being present, not dispersed, not blown away, rather with other presences "blowing back into us."
Be warned, and we are warned, de la Perrière signs to us, provides awareness, constantly, of our (life's, meaning's, coherency's) "dispersal, a siren bursting / a warning as piercing as God." While warned and dispersed, though, we also constitute the very atoms which disperse, the very sounds in which we hear the ocean, the very poems which in de la Perrière's words fall to our ears and rise "over the ridge like a troop of fixed stars."
These poems cast infinity, a net just wide enough.
note: all quotations, other than the epigraphs, are from Donna de la Perrière, Works of Love & Terror. Talisman House Publishers, 2019.