in mid-November, a season
when all human dreams are the same,
a uniform, blotted out history
like that of a sun-dried stone

a couple of mute parents stand there,
a dog and some children run round,
an arrival they try to imagine
as water that’s raised to my mouth

I lay sleeping inside my hotel room;
it was like an alien dream
that the guest before me must have shouldered
aside in his sleep and forgot

in the dream there was no one familiar;
I met only the blank scrutiny
of an apricot tree in bloom, turning
around as it left suddenly

perhaps it was left there one summer
when the world was as white as a feast,
before I had learned that a dreamer
must dream like the trees, be a dreamer
of fruit to the last