Valor Begins in Sleep

I dreamed you had a wife, dressed
all in goat skins. I didn’t question this
nor the length of her hair which bent girls wove in looms.
She filled the dark tent like a red ember, singing,
pulling plump ropes of bread in her hands.
I wanted to drink water
from her fingers. Grace
is false, beauty is vain,
I loved your fictious wife despite and woke
confused. ‘Who is this woman
your wife?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell me
about her?’
You laughed. In your laughter
was the passage from one world to the next.
Your wife
was singing, “Kindness
is the basis of everything in this world,
but love is brief,”
she was baking new loaves in the ashes,
the girls wove yellow coats from her long hair
for the poor and the widows.
O, love me quietly
into the morning,
don’t laugh too harshly as I mutter
fitful in the pillow. Restive beneath my skin
the women croon, weaving
scarlet garments for their households,
lifting their gentle arms
in a sinuous rhythm of praise.