An Archeologist Finds a Passage

I dreamt I found a planet of my own.
And now I wake to find the dream has changed
me, changed everything, suffused our lives
in streams of quantum time whose waters bled
the homeland riverbeds. The surgeon’s arc
of dawn won’t cauterize the flower heads.
I dreamt I lived alone in my own world.
And now I wake to find I do. Oh where
in sleep does twilight mine the salt of sea?
I saw you in that land of future palms
that yielded many dates to not exist,
and saw myself, as though I was before
a mirror that reflected on itself,
and never gleaned how time translates to time,
how beauty bides within a foreign script,
its hapax legomena unpronounced.
I dreamt I scrawled your name in water
backwards, with my left hand, and didn’t know
how hard the coming tide would flay the shore.
Why does slow aeolian erosion
compose its domed abodes of clocks and chimes?
My god, why? But forsake me, forgo me.
My shadow turned away from you. The reeds
are growing in my chest and in my eyes.
The photons fell in different ways for you.
And white dwarfs dissolved in cups of tea.
The light fell off the tower’s edge and crashed
into an atrium. One third a life
in twenty minutes, lived, unlived- can’t say.
I tried to touch the autumn of your face:
The moisture dripped beyond where space extends
but I distilled it, undripped, untocked.
I crossed the bridge of stolen time with you
and never learned the legend of your youth,
the pre-eternal garden speaking sleep,
or how the oak trees grew within your veins
because I missed the words, and let my breath
pass above your hair, like something being said.