A Cup of Water Turns into a Rose (excerpt) (Lawrence Raab)

Today's poem by Lawrence Raab is 1/7th of the whole thing. This first part is long enough though (it's broken up into 6 sections) , so the full thing must be quite the epic.

There is no cup of water or rose in this abridged selection, but still there is transformation and real and unreal things.

This poem seems to be concerned with dreaming, with the line between reality and imagined. between nature and the constructed. Oh, and a man named John Ruskin - whom I had never heard of, but in looking him up, seems to have been an art critic in the Victorian age who "emphasised the connections between nature, art and society" (thank you, Wikipedia).

I like that in this poem, it starts with N inside a dream, but then he wakes up and then goes on to dream/half-imagine a war scene and a stranger who knows about such things (he may actually be talking to the stranger in real life).

It's all a bit of muddle, but I like its complexity.

The poem -- " "At times," he says, "the impossible / looks like it's on our side / until it isn't." " The impossible, the dream, the imagined seems so real - so true, that it isn't until it's over that you even knew it really was a dream or imagined or impossible. 

Maybe it's because I don't have access to the other 6 parts, or perhaps it's my unfamiliarity with Ruskin, but I'm having a hard time coming to a conclusion about this poem. I feel like the point is almost -just- there, but I can't bring my observations to thread through the whole poem (er, section). However, I still like and feel challenged by this poem. And I am now curious to learn more about John Ruskin. 

Favorite line: "I noticed / the radio—shiny and black, with huge dials, / like nothing I'd ever owned, maybe/something out of the Second World War, / or a movie about it"