Where We Started

If people can dream together, we dream together.
This is the way it always starts.
Out of the darkness of the streets that lie between us
and the river rising like a rampart raised to part the city
from its dreamed and dreaming counterpart across the river
falling like leaves shed by the streetlamps every evening
dreaming they shed light and keep the city from the river,
we make our way back to each other’s side.

It doesn’t take long. It never does,
not in the dream we dream together.
I know you and you know me so well,
all we need to find each other is to sleep.
Inside this world more real than real
we’re always more and more awake.
It’s how we dream it.

And maybe because it’s a collaboration,
like a double negative,
what we end up with is the opposite of a dream,
where I’m about to tell you something
but you already know it,
and you’re about to tell me,
since we’re dreaming together,
so that we stop and start and smile and stop again
like two strangers in a doorway.

But whatever it is that parts,
like dawn the lips of the curtains,
like the last look,
tears us from each other’s side,
you, half way across the labyrinth of dream
and boulevard, and me, in my half,
at the end of the street
at the end of the night,
the streetlamps stepping back in their own darkness
where we started.