By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A dream of a woman who appears, withdraws, and returns becomes a meditation on time, desire, and remembered speech.
The speaker treats the dream as both visitation and loss: the woman appears in youth and beauty, retreats under the condition of further change, and leaves only remembered speech after time has removed the original immediacy.
'Sleep' tracks a dream-woman through a cycle of arrival and refusal: 'To invoke a dream,, slight at first / She is there, asking you how you can stay,' 'Little and young, and questioning,' who 'grows / Then stops and runs, changes and labores.' She returns only to deny him - 'Saying you can't have me now / Until we once more change / and do do away with age again' - binding desire to an impossible reversal of time. The closing turn is elegiac and stubborn: 'Time took me out of that beauty / But I am telling you, / I remember what she said.' Memory of her speech outlasts the beauty time removed. Source spellings 'labores' and the repeated 'do do' are preserved.