“Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”
— Alfred Hitchcock

To the edge of the dream he comes; barefoot,
cloven-hoof, crooked goat legs. I do not know
his name, but from his pipes and his man’s root,
a cock from hell, garbled prayer-songs grow;
like a root, a tree, a mountain, vaulting
heaven and shadowing earth. To the edge
of the dream he comes; unabashed, playing
nightmare to my dreams. Passing a stone hedge,
a street, a market where ham-hocks and fish
dangle in the window, I follow. Dream
logic says I can do nothing else. Prayer-
songs on cobbles, his clip-clop, his goatish
delight that I’m there, to hear his obscene
song, to be the dreamer to his nightmare.

][][

Notes.

Aristotle said that for Heraclitus the soul was the “exhalation of which everything else is composed
of;” and Walt Whitman asked, “if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”