I DREAM OF CROWDS

I dream of crowds, in different guises.

I dream of drunken orgiastic crowds

on sandy cliffs and beaches.

The aboriginal sun never falling.

Everyone wearing the sun as a crown.

I dream a crowded DART, a mile-long DART

snaking through a bombed-out Cork,

past blazing stacks on Wexford hills,

through cratered Dublin exurbs,

and the passengers all dressed in sackcloth rags,

a sorry exodus with overspilling suitcases

in glazed-eye shock that seems enchantment,

squat on seatless carriages

all hypnotic concentration on

one missing infant’s undulating wail that never stops.

I dream a carnival crowd from my primary years.

Feral chaws in stripes and masks

picting through my childhood town,

provoking for sport the well-primed hate

of other, crushed inhabitants.

A part of me, a knowing part,

a mockingly prophetic

part, has yet to abandon

the animal tribe of my youth.

Then I dream an underground crowd,

an enormous underworld crowd on the march.

Their bodies are thickets of shadow,

their legs an endless Bohemian wood.

So many flushed, exhausted middle-aged faces,

grim faces of miners, musicians, and executives,

sardined together there in close and hopeless darkness,

hard of breath and groaning, not even muttering

thin fibs of consolation to themselves.

Nearby, a throbbing edge is leaking to a constant flow

which might be surging hell’s volcanic flood,

might be a river of decomposed sludge

or might not be an edge atall

but be the elliptical curve

where the protean crowd I don’t own

with no beginning or end in my head

is always doubling doubling

doubling doubling doubling back

upon the treadmill of itself

in the mobius way the whitecoats say

our universe does.