Dan Enache Poet Free verse

Umbrella of Hours

Umbrella of Hours

I walked backward on the ceiling, with an umbrella of hours,
I left my self on the coat rack like a wax hat,
and the coat rack coughed up an entire choir of little fish,
down sleep's escalator I descended toward a door,
but the door was a hard-boiled egg, round and without handles.

Dreams are pajamas of smoke sewn onto a streetcar of embers,
and desire, a rooster with a door latch instead of a comb,
crows at a quarter to three in the language of the milk moon,
I feed it with eyelashes and forgotten telegrams,
and at dawn it turns me inside out like a glove of ash.

I evaporate through the keyhole into a bottomless coffee,
where the echo, wearing glasses, can no longer find its voice,
I remain alone, when the world is still unleavened dough,
empty as a bunch of keys that forgot what they open,
and I float in the belly of a blue glass elephant.

Maybe the dream is a cupboard in which another cupboard sleeps,
and I, a moon button on the coat of a mute crane,
slide from dream to dream like a spoon across a lake of pitch,
among doors that open into the pockets of other doors,
and the self, a mustachioed firefly, glows by forgetting that it burns.

Beyond the last dream there is only a staircase without steps,
up which climbs an angel in boots of unborn snow,
the silence before the letter, when the name was sleeping,
and the one who sleeps, the one dreamed, the one awakened are one dew,
and everything returns to the hard-boiled egg with its bolted door.

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Alison A Smith October 2, 2026 at 6:57 PM A wonderfully sustained surrealist free-verse sequence, where each impossible image opens naturally into the next. The recurring coat rack, doors, dreams, and hard-boiled egg give the poem an uncanny circular architecture, while its lyrical syntax makes the strangeness feel dream-true rather than arbitrary. The closing return to the “hard-boiled egg with its bolted door” is especially effective: it gathers the poem’s motifs into a beautifully sealed, enigmatic ending.