Kurt Elling: NIGHT DREAMER

Lonely the roses of Avondaire sing as though somebody still may care.
They live only for the dream of living so come follow where they will take you there.

I once was apprenticed to a man who was living
in the eye if the hurricane to know despair,

He knew all the dreams by heart just like sailing in a boat of
crystal silence seeing visions of the world of life within a life.

In a turning like a burning came turning
out of everything stirring and what had begun before

but all wrapped up in one great godly becoming -

Tumbling and fumbling and stumbling
into bumbling and rumbling along -

whirling it and swirling it and twirling it and hurling it
and overturning it and burning it again.

I shared a whirling dervish out on the side of a hill called metaphore vivace
swinging en route to a nascent solar with the scissored visored blizzard wizard
gizzarding planets and secrets within like an avatar.

While meanwhile in turnstyling and spinning over him
spells bespeaking kingdoms in the dark

calling me to yield knighting me in a field covered with armies
and with princes. All were signing cannons shining pennants flying.

And when he spoke to me he sang and his words really rang -
this child of the knowledge of the beauty of the night -

he sang to me of masters passing on of father after father after father
climbing up into the lotus bloom upon the tortoise's back

and of grandfathers who danced through their living a longer time ago.
He showed me a palace in time in which all the talismans
from all the zeuses swing upon a pendulum of secrets
in a circle that remembers and when asked a question will surren