A poet once said to write a dream is cheating

—if that's so, then every poem must be some kind 
of fraud or a lie. But when I woke to the news of your 
silence, who's to say I did not actually limp through 
the grass like a wounded fox or fly through the air 
as a small, soft creature snatched up in a raptor's 
claws? All the time, we have conversations with 
ourselves or with others in our minds. Which is to say 
even these are a kind of dream of hunting the right kind
of language that can sigh like a soft rain before dawn, 
or lisp like the lost string of a mandolin that someone
is trying to tune in the next room. Joy is a dream
and grief is a dream: their tassels sway against 
each other, each with impossible softness.