O Give Me Dreams Any Day Poem by Sally Evans

They speak again, like youth and daisies,
rise like religions and subside like dough
left too long, before the baking.
They catch people who are busy putting up
d-i-y extensions or demolishing
caved-in sheds. They are dreams
and memories of dreams.

I say I dreamed you were in the driving seat
and I grasped the handbrake as we careered
down the steep summer driveway in our little car.
Dreams never obey miles, or commandments.
We are their speciality. In our own garden
I look up through one birch tree summer-green
of systematic leaf and see a forest.

I call the corner by the fence a wood,
a hide where chicory-flowered artichokes
rise en masse with all their clones,
and dog-rose creeps out sideways for some air.
The wood is a cheat but a good cheat -
I never go so far as to call it a forest
but hedgehog and passing fox are there,
tomtit, fickle flocks of family bluetits,
and under all the humus, brittle bones,
and in the jungle treetops, butterflies.

Memory, our tea party is arranged here
as promised, on a forecast day,
clouds passing deliberately like freeway cars,
and an empty, shady house, protecting
the garden's quasi-silence, half-life, whole dream.
Memory, I am a little delirious,
a silly old lady by a basket-table
talking to no one in particular.

See what the basket holds. Flowers! Scissors!
Secateurs! And chicken-wire, obeying
strange rules of twisted hexagonals,
necessarily, unobserved. Life goes on
like a quad with nobody about in it, no stuffy
or quirky professors, fluffy professors' secretaries,
clever professors' secretaries with an eye on the chair,
no one, nothing like this, no one is there
but marooned vegetable life, a rife atmosphere
and me, though I don't count, sitting at a table.

I thought Memory was a Tragic Quean
but she turned up gay, dispensing juleps
with orange and mint in them
and pouring out anecdotes without stinting them.
I sat nodding and listening as she spoke,
aware how many jokes I was missing
but somehow, grateful for the rendezvous
and glad of her solipsistic I-love-you.

Dreams end how they like. But not poems,
which are not woken from. The fear
within the dream too great, or the alarm without
too loud, or the nonsense completed, all's done,
back into pleasing blackness the soul falls.
A broken poem's no good to anyone.

We ditch our broken poems, accept as made
only those that reach conclusions.
Perhaps we should value our unfinished poems
for their dreamlike qualities, Any that are finished
we should simply term lectures or periods, long sentences
of pedagogic intent, and egotistic intention.
A poem is a dastardly invention.

O give me dreams any day, they speak again
like youth and daisies,
rise like religions and subside like dough
left too long, before the baking.
They catch people who are busy putting up
d-i-y extensions or demolishing
caved-in sheds. They are dreams
and memories of dreams.

From Memory sequence, Looking for Scotland