You dream you’re home: the voices cushion you,
calmly discuss what you don’t understand,
you sit at table, and have seen warm colour land
where blinds let curdled summer sunbeams through,

and on pressed linen tablecloths appear –
your mind’s a blank, and meanings symbolise
that once more things are not what you surmise,
their outside’s now an inside, close to fear.

It stands there still, but your heart never finds
the jasmine-bordered path, the wicket white,
yourself the gateway to this realm of dreams

behind a house front with its lowered blinds;
the garden too where you dropped out of sight
proves a poem you released in vain.