Such confusions – is all of life but a dream – come at any age, but I think you need to have put in a certain number of years to really recognise those rapt drenchings.
The Art of Forgetting
Swivelling from a damp duvet at an hour
Too late for sleep, too early for work,
I wonder if sleep & its rapt drenchings
Are part of the art of forgetting or remembering.
Since whatever grips the mind in these dark hours
Is distinct, pungent, but elusive as smoke.
In the morning it is there & it is not there.
Who knows what it meant or what it means?
Writing this, it occurs to me to recall
A prep-room thirty years ago: Lister, owlish
At chess, scornful of fooling; Campling cutting card
For trains; brown Ryback laughing, tamping a rocket.
All is gone, the room, the house itself gone,
To allow for a widened road easing the traffic
Into & out of the seething heart of dreams.
Forgetting? Remembering? It seems to be all the same.
John Fuller
