Night Dream - Kurt Elling

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 metaphor 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 turn styling 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