Moya Cannon: "Who Conducts the Music of Our Dreams?"

ALMA,

I woke up saying the word,
just as, a few mornings earlier, I had woken up
saying 'The Silk Road'.
Who conducts the music our our dreams?
leaving us with only one clear note -- a word for 'soul'
or a name for the most sensuous, the most tortured, of early roads,
a name given at a distance, in hindsight,
by someone who had never travelled it --
not even once clear road either, but several,
a web of camel routes through thorn and sand and storm,
mule tracks over frozen mountain gaps
to where silk worms chewed on mulberry leaves,
spun from their bodies the strong filaments of dreams.

--Moya Cannon