Robsonnet [2008-01-14 19:42:52 +0000 UTC]

What I love about this is difficult to articulate, as is often the case when I try to comment on poems by writers more in touch with their right brains than I.

Maybe that's part of it right there. You start off very strong--finding a good first line is often half the work of writing the poem, and you do it well, especially here--bypassing the conceptual and go straight to the sensual, smells being the most primitive and emotionally evocative of all sensations.

I really love the "haunting" theme, the sense of your sometime lover being in a parallel existence, present but out of sight, absent but inescapable. The repeated words and phrases reinforce that sense of parallelism. I get the sense that the title refers not just to sleeping dreams but also to that dreamlike presence.

fading into wintry blackness,
snow under feet
This is jarring, kind of chilling.

'I love you' is a group of words I seldom use in poetry any more, figuring they had lost their impact long before my muse was even conceived, but I think you're talking about the last sound one hears before sleeping, and in that sense it works.

with open arms and an empty bed
I've always loved your lack of coyness about the fact that love is also physical.

hoping that I lose myself enough
to find you again.
Oh my yes. Excellent ending. Gives me the sense of the separation being in some sense selfish, regardless of how necessary and desirable, and that you see him waiting for the time that you can become a 'we' again.

I have really missed your poetry. I'm eager to see how it may be transformed by happiness.

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