Two poems

Mercedes Lawry

​
The Oneiroscopist

I come upon this Transcriber of Dreams
in a book on surrealist painters
in the 30s and 40s, consider
how this work once startled and disturbed
though the painters look
oddly respectable, perhaps abiding
by Flaubert’s dictum.

The Oneiroscopist, a chimera
with an exceedingly long beak,
perches in the clouds
like royalty on a throne.
Beside it,
a weighty underwater diver’s helmet,
that fastens on a neck brace
like a lid on a jar of olives.
Some thought this a comedic touch
as Dali himself almost suffocated
wearing a diver’s suit to an exhibition.
Clearly the creature cannot fit its beak
into the helmet,
which tells us something or everything
or nothing.

When Edith Rimmington first saw
this style of painting, she found her place
in the world, exploring
the strange in us made visual –
no rules or limits or confines,
like dreams.
It was possible to reach beyond
the ordinary, and make wild art
as a kind of shatter.
​

As Glaciers Disappear

Less in the mineral sense,
the essence being vague
and possibly blue.

Inside the craters, clues,
beneath the ice, more clues
finally revealed as sounds

of crashing. Winter
in the blood, A turning ,
and turning away, false weeping.

The praise singers are in the valley,
they try so diligently.
Each moon as a forgiveness.
Lucky the dark stars.

---

Mercedes Lawry’s most recent book is Vestiges from Kelsay Books. She’s published three chapbooks and poems in journals such as Nimrod and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her book Small Measures is forthcoming from ELJ Editions, Ltd. in 2024. She’s also published short fiction and stories and poems for children.