April 29

The return of winter to Edmonton calls for a prosier reprise of this title.

Winter garden

The sleepers lie so deep, their gardens go unplanted. Their summer song unsung forever, the spring-words half-remembered. The rose and the smell of running water here. And then a voice that tries to find itself, to speak the saddest silence.

It is said the sleepers never wake to rise, only babble with their bedmates, discuss the latest zygote or virtual reality, unplugged from the umbilical cords of imagined souls.

The sleepers dance in masques of nightmare shapes. All-serious now, they bury their affections in cozy plots of work and reason, complain of what they miss on full-moon nights, refuse the cracks of entry to another life in stars.

It is said the sleepers put themselves to sleep at last with dreams of tv, mortgages and murder. They give up hope and try to plant themselves in vain, their only seedlings dust of secret song.

In the great shared cemetery of heart and mind, the sleepers stretch their forevers in separate pallets, ache to recall a recurring dream: the sprouting wings of distant love.

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