Life revives at the point of art’s rebirth,
Where we dream of painting the infinite.
Dreams are the language which mediates life,
Through life’s endless renewals we offer our dreams,
We pen and paint and sing this born pretense
To lend substance to what is endless air.
We dream of seeing what we are,
Of feeling it in our hands.
We invent the clay we need to sculpt
Ourselves into immortal forms, to populate the void.
The painting which mirrors the map of stars
Reflecting the image our souls have seen
Is the sacrament of our primal myths,
Though our efforts all sum to miniatures,
Scrimshaw scrawled on the fossils of our souls.
Our ambition demands the mirror-quest,
We search through our minds for the sheens we need,
The scene demands all perfections at once,
For the image of life to reflect what life is,
For the sum of the suns to shine on the waves,
Compiling an arch toward the solar key,
Rosetta stone of the night’s lost mystery,
Promising illumination at last, forever -
As the lines tremble and coincide,
We behold the bridge consummated.
We dream the eternal bridge, an eternal cycle crystallized.
Plato called thought a process of remembrance.
All past threshholds of sleep sum the souls which awake,
Our long-sleeping souls which carve lines into shade,
Which the new sun inflames into visions.
But these are the scenes which danced in our eyes
As we last fell asleep.
While we dream we compile a new image-world,
We only dust off the old one.
Waking, we only dust off ourselves.
This is the crystal we dream.
We wake anew, to a sun we’ve never seen,
Whose mystery lends clues of continuity.
We search the dawn’s shadows for traces of night,
And of what we dream we saw
In the dreams we dream we dreamt all night,
In a night we know never was
But we try to pretend into having been.
For if it really passed, and the dreams really danced,
They could have danced to a song from yesterday,
Where we once danced for a different sun,
Whose clues of continuity lend mystery
To this morning’s sun we’ve never seen.
If the light and love of our newest dawns
Were mingled in any of our past nights,
The spangling would range infinite,
Splashing the sky with a million dazzling suns.
The shores of this sky at our islands’ fringe
Would dissolve all bounds of vision and voice,
Assuming all life we could ever know.
The fringe of forever would harmonize
Becoming and being, and we’d finally find peace.
But in art we find only intimations,
Whose frailness belies the dream of peace,
Implies storm and surge and the billowed fears.
But the battering wave is why we live,
To share its ride’s the vast purpose we dream,
And we see that life is not what we paint,
That our art is our souls’ respiration;
That we paint our lives at our breathing pace,
Conjure ourselves from the nothing we were,
Blaze with the light of the life that we are.
Diana Castro Website
