Hopes And Dreams I Tell You Poem by Diane Seuss

are nougat but there is something
else though not so sweet, no merging,
no synchrony of watches but a kind of—
well, you've seen a heron stand
solo in the middle of a pond,
poised, throat tilted back to feel
the dogfish swim down or a woman
at the edge of a meadow staring off,
not at something she's achieved just
off into the unified field, or El Greco's self
portrait from 1604, long chin resting
in the ruffled collar like a delicate bird
in a crumbling nest, ears poking out and sad
averted brown eyes his Jerónima once soothed
with her cool fingertips, lines in the forehead
rising to the yellow eggish cranium where once
the dream resided, even El Greco, wealthy
enough to hire musicians to play while they dined, alone
at last in the frame like an owl hunched on a tree limb
or a small white cat moving through the Rose
of Sharon at 3 a.m. or a woman racked with grief
stumbling toward the kitchen in her sour bedclothes
to eat white cherries straight from the can.