THE CERTAINTY DREAM

The problem is coming to know in a dream. In mine

other people were sleeping and dreaming. Someone was snoring.

The problem was folded neatly over itself into an origami bird.

Tools were provided. For instance:

a limestone house, a package of straight pins

and a stone sarcophagus.

Origami is a puzzle. The creases are approximations.

The result is shapely. Certainty could be folded

into a featherless bird. Tossed into the air, it might not fly

but it might hover there for a few seconds

and shit all over the stone

before it can be shot down with pins.

It’s equally possible that the dream house is not really

a house at all, but a bird, folded stone.

The pins cause indigestion and the sarcophagus,

a built-in part of the anatomy.

The difficult part is shrinking the sarcophagus

until it’s the size of a small jewellery box,

then juggling it with the bird and the pins,

so quickly they become part of one circle

without so much as a bruise, or a pin prick or a paper cut.

Briefly, everything is not a weight in hand but airborne.