Is That A Raven’s Wing Or Black Snake Skin?

by Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

It is deceptive, the desolate nature
of places in dreams, neural structures
that grow metaphors, mountains,
corridors, streams, synapses—junctions,
transmission and reception; I stop
there often, pausing to let ions pass
in colors that elude language,
amidst creatures that defy senses,
primal, side-viewed, sometimes
mirroring my circadian self. Sleeping
beside a building until stars cease
streaming down from a sky, light
barely visible after the stellar storm,
cortisol pulling the waking self
up toward morning, but not yet;
instead I become a shadow leading
a tour of visitors in my dream, point
to something surfacing in the ooze
of a pulsing pond. “Is that a raven’s
wing or black snake skin?” I ask
with educational authority, knowing
it is merely some genetic memory
caught in the fluttering of my eyelids.