From The Dream Book

 Converting all my poems that came directly from dreams in prose-poems, with words and passages added as needed. My dreams are no common dreams, as this example shows. Who dreams of being a mountain range?

 I DREAMT I WAS THE APENNINES

I dreamt I was the Apennines, a thousand miles of me from Liguria to Reggio, on to my toe-hold across the water in Sicily. I was so large that a cloud-front was but a single breath into my caverned lungs. My sleep withholds the fury of volcanoes, the wrath of avalanche. I hoard one tiny glacier to ice my summer fever.

Then Zeus came back in his dark thundercloud — welcome after so many centuries of slumber — to tell me his temple had been restored in Athens, and that a sacrificial fire now burned anew, to the despair of the bearded Orthodox. The old Gods are worshiped once more!

He brought me a great earthquake. Ah, I wanted it to go on forever. All the way to Rome, they will be feeling my fervor. Let Paris burn, and Lisbon shudder! Like the old days: down, Babylon — Atlantis, sink! Rise, seas, even above Poseidon’s head!

Look at them running, the little ants!

Tyrants and breakers of oaths, flee from your shabby brickwork assemblies!

Now that I am awakened, I summon the poets, musicians, painters, and madmen. Come to the Abruzzi and its sheltering peaks, where the secret police will never find you. Come to my untamed forests beneath, where the Italian wolf still suckles Romulus, and where the brown bear alone abides. Forte e gentile, mountains of bandits, hideout of excommunicated patriots, refuge of Partisans disguised as shepherds.

I dreamt I was the Apennines, and how, one day, I would walk to Rome with boulders as my sandals, mendicant to bring the stones of Chthonic temples back, to rebuild the halls of dark serpentine ophiolite, to rest upon the stones of the Nazarene. No bread, no blood, for his followers — lava and ash instead!

These things take time. A volcano would help to move my plans along.

Meantime I will tread on landslide, mudslide and flood. Sink holes will be my footprints, but I will come. Mountains are more patient than clouds, more full of purpose than the churning sea. Tremble, Rome, before my bells of stone!