“The Gods of Dreams by David Krause” by Danny Vesurai, Class of 2022
The Gods of Dreams by David Krause
Hypnos
The doctors injected a river,
a hose in your body,
and adjusted the machines.
You saw me and smiled
like through water and eked out
for me a poppy against,
compressed from the heaviness of the pages
of the book in which they lay:
The myths, which we read.
The myths, in which we rescued ourselves.
I plucked the poppy from your fingers.
You asked me to wait for you.
Hypnos jolted my hand
and readied narcosis.
By nightlit bodies gleamed scalpels. Thoughts rambled: What
did you deam of under the knives? Where
did we journey one last time?
I waited by the river in the park, the shadow of the flower wandered
and dissolved with the hours.
Morpheus
Maybe we journeyed into the mountains,
where we searched for ourselves as children in echoes,
and greeted a man
who painted lines on paper
like smoke:draft of a city. Maybe
construction workers swarmed the country
and detonated stones in the mountains.
The thunder resonated through the valleys.
The concrete mixers turned like clocks.
They mixed darkness, water and sand
and the constructs rose to the sky.
Maybe we went together
through the city and every man
had his face and no one
was related to us. Maybe
your thoughts moved themselves
tectonically to a new sentence: This place
never belonged to us.
The city stood untouched. It grew
a crack through our bodies.
Phobetor
Maybe we found in the wilderness
a place to sleep, where bats waited for us.
We paid with ourselves. They dug their teeth in our bodies. It didn't ache.
Maybe we followed them further,
eavesdropping on how they created rooms
with their voices, how they strode through rooms:
poets of our time. Maybe
spiders spun you a shirt, much lighter than everything
you'd ever word. Maybe
honeycombs grew in our heads
and thoughts became touch. Maybe
the bees buzzed in the dark
around our bed and before the window
stood a clock, in which their queen hummed.
Phantasos
Maybe we stood embracing
by a closed window.
A sandstorm moved by, through
empty temples: song. Sand
gushed against the glass: whispered
questions which faded late. Maybe
myths end here. Maybe
we dug up by morning light
the blown-over bicycle
and rode into the distance. Maybe
we stopped in a place
full of shattered hourglasses
and lacerated our feet. Maybe
we wandered through the deserts,
followed a wadi in the night,
evaded the flow,
and you knelt by the bank and drank
darkness and sand.
Thanatos
How many rivers does the EEG measure?
How many yearnings does the EKG measure?
The doctors had uncovered your brain.
I laid the poppy in the book and shut it.
Silent you lay there and went onward on journeys.
A doctor read the time from his watch.
The line on the display,
that was the horizon.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Translated from German. Originally Die Götter der Träume from the 2016 book Die Umschreibung des Flusses. I have tried to keep as closely as possible to the literal meaning and structure of the text to better to lay bare the rhythms of translation.
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