Back And Forth At Twilight

[Billy]

Back And Forth At Twilight

Fortnight of midnights in seven days,
birds sing & forget to sing. Forgotten
are sleep & dreams, dreams & sleep.
I hold my life between breaths, run
with a pillow, fly with a blanket,
land in the middle of an Iowa field.

Rows, like open venetian blinds, a field
of corn straighter than a week of days.
Tied to a stake, clothes a torn blanket,
straw mind, heart, days & nights forgotten.
Before crows gather & startled deer run
to row's end. Hostages of cornsilk sleep.

Living two days in one, I'm forever sleep-
less, as far from slumber as a fallow field.
Sunset red hills meet the sky at a dead run.
Like a plowed stone, I sough echoed days
in caves of mind, bats in repose, forgotten,
black wings shroud like a typhoid blanket.

Far to the west, time's a stiff, woven blanket,
multicolored. Sheep, who are wolves, sleep
with other sheep--don't taste--they've forgotten
the dark & the light & the stone & the field.
This is the land of not-coming-back-to-days,
countless miles from the east, a backward run.

Ghosts on painted ponies, time wills to run
from the place it began. Silence in a blanket.
Snow on mountaintops counted by days
cut in half. On the other side, is there sleep?
Deep in the sky, like an ocean, a star field
sinks outward to the edge of the forgotten.

From the homeward path, I wander, forgotten,
dreams obscured by dark clouds on the run.
Stillness & motion harvested from the field
hands, feet, heart, from a body in a blanket
of light. Neither dreams or waking sleep
through the backlog of bodiless days.

In the field of time, at the pinnacle of days,
forgotten when awakened, carried in sleep,
I run to the other side in a patchwork blanket.

[Kenneth2816]

Lot of good imagery and I love the backdrop of corn fields. It has an ethereal quality, the use of stilted language ( sough, repose, etc.) makes it sound like it's from another time. I don't understand everything that's happening, but I like it very much

[Billy]

This is the sestina I posted earlier.

Thanks for commenting Kenneth.