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The Dream of the Marsh Wren:

Reciprocal Creation

 

The marsh wren, furtive and tail-tipped,

by the rapid brown blurs of his movements

makes sense of the complexities of sticks

and rushes.  He makes slashes and complicated

lines of his own in mid-air above the marsh

by his flight and the rattles of his incessant

calling.  He exists exactly as if he were a product

of the pond and the sky and the blades of light

among the reeds and grasses, as if he were

deliberately willed into being by the empty

spaces he eventually inhabits.

 

And at night, inside each three-second

shudder of his sporadic sleep, understand

how he creates the vision of the sun

blanched and barred by the diagonal juttings

of the weeds, and then the sun as heavy

cattail crossed and tangled and rooted

deep in the rocking of its own gold water,

and then the sun as suns in flat explosions

at the bases of the tule.  Inside the blink

of his eyelids, understand how he composes

the tule dripping sun slowly in gold rain

off its black edges, and how he composes

gold circles widening on the blue surface

of the sun's pond, and the sharp black

slicing of his wing rising against the sun,

and that same black edge skimming the thin

corridor of gold between sky and pond.

 

Imagine the marsh wren making himself

inside his own dream.  Imagine the wren,

created by the marsh, inside the marsh

of his own creation, unaware of his being

inside this dream of mine where I imagine

he dreams within the boundaries of his own

fixed black eye around which this particular

network of glistening weeds and knotted

grasses and slow-dripping gold mist

and seeded winds shifting in waves of sun

turns and tangles and turns itself completely

inside out again here composing me

in the stationary silence of its only existence.

 

    Pattiann Rogers