Vanishing Point – a poem by Dan Campion

Vanishing Point

Last night the creatures in my dreams were kind
and cordial. Men with jaws of wolf and hound
and gliding owl-winged women eased my mind,
my ushers to a slumber more profound.
I got the sense that they were dreaming too,
their round eyes, which at first looked so awake,
trained inward toward some feral privileged view
the demons who weave sleep craft for their sake.
The point that vanishes is still a point,
although there’s nothing there, or just a dot
of paint or wax a clay lamp might anoint
with unguent light, both of this world and not.
The world abides by time. Time stops for light.
Light winds itself inside itself at night. 

Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/