The Interpretation of Dreams

You are my Sweetheart;
Sang the tin can
I was sitting on a truck
As it rolled along
You are my Truck
Sang my Sweetheart
Somehow it was menacing
An ominous song
I hardly knew what to say I went into the truck
It was amazing
That autumn afternoon, when every affection came unsought
As from an unstoppered lute and a glass of campari
Was downed from a shimmering glass and quickly as if nothing
Could harm the eternal beaver any more. But a policeman of high reflection
Suddenly stood up for the traffic crossings' protection
And were we sad, lost in thought at our newfound abortionlessness
In stages, because of a green kerchief stuck in your pocket
As one asks What's the difference between that and a handkerchief? and
Between each stop and its parenthesis? Let's assume we have too much
And pound on the marble table top. It has always gone best that way
Yet you're thinking (I think) “Yet the hand falls off
And the streets of Paris will continue to go every which way.
No, in spite of your palaver
And a summertime gift for describing the rose
You will have to take me into another valley
Where reality is not affliction.” Or if you did not think that all at once
Toward that our thoughts have been gathering. Whose omnibus is that parked outside the S. S. Rose
With a Himalayan flagboy in the window of the car
Scratching his initials A.H., A.H., as the winter evening dies
And turns into a springtime fogbound morning? I was sleeping in the hay
When we awoke. One could just barely make out the sky. A truck raced past.
Then I realized where we were. It was potato season. And, Spiff! this season was to be our last
Before we dangled before tomatoes, hard red ones and yellow yummy
Tomatoes and huge hard pink ones which were brighter than the nose
Of Snow White in Walt Disney's fiction. I am going into slaveland
To help these tomatoes get free, but they come thumping
After. “Wait for us! Wait! You will see! It is impossible to serve us unless we are there!”
And the tomatoes turned into apples. I was wide awake. The cook said, “You are my Sweetheart.”
And a band played “The Abortion of the Sleeper may be the Swan Song of the Sheep-Man's Heart.”

Into this valley my sweetheart came
The tomatoes were hard as her nose
She was available exactly
Five minutes every aftemoon
Then she took Snow White
Into the kidney parlor
She said "Snow White, be an actress!"
And Snow White implored the yellow movies
To be more reasonable about Al Capp
"He's a swell guy"
We know we know
But he's not purple anymore
A large picture flew through the sky
My Sweetheart put on it
"I am the Capostranni of the Rose"
And William Butler Yeats died
When Auden wrote the poem
About the deftness of the steamship
Plying through the harbor
Is my Sweetheart's nose.

Meanwhile Snow White and her boyfriend
Have gone up into the mountains.
It is amazing what they will do for a game of bingo!
No! That is not what they are doing. Look!
They are making love! I didn’t know that was allowed in the movies
In this country! But that must be what they are doing!
She is lying beneath him and every time his body rose
I saw her fingerprints gripping the dust hke the U.S.S. Idaho
In an old story. Do you know the one of the Frightening Fidget?
Well, in this one old Doctor Barnose
Is riding along through Italy on a great white highway
Made of marshmallows, when some greensuited policemen come out
And make him stop to show his passport, which he had had made out of clothes
As a modem novelty, but they threw him in the purple prison.
Where like an Italianate tirade of grapejuice something exist to this day
Numbered among the aquanauts who saved this country
From being bombed by the submarines which I purchased you for my birthday
In one of my most powerful moods, on the Pomeranian coast.