Planktivorous Fish and the Structure of Pelagic Plankton

by David Clink

I woke up, thinking of you,
but it was a dream,

like many of the dreams I told you about,
I hadn’t gotten up yet,

I was still dreaming.

Then, I woke up for real, I thought,
thinking of you, as I was wont to do,

but, I was still dreaming,
like many of the dreams I shared with you.

When I was still dreaming
I fell asleep in that dream

and dreamed that I woke up
not thinking of you,

and imagined we had never met,
and I was with someone else.

Like many of the dreams I kept from you
I still hadn’t gotten up yet,

I was still dreaming.

Then, in that same dream, I wrote a poem
about dreaming,

and woke up and forgot the poem,
forgot I was still asleep,

forgot you,
forgot I was still dreaming.

But, like many of my dreams,
you were there.

In cleaning the apartment last week
I found, written on a piece of scrap,

the title of an academic paper:

Planktivorous Fish and the Structure of
Pelagic Plankton

I had planned to write a poem with that title.
Unless, that memory, too, was a dream.

It was so long ago, years before we met,
like so many things, forgotten,

the dreams I had, when I was young.

— from Juniper Volume 2, Issue 2