A
few nights ago, I dreamed I was with my husband in a concrete house
that was suspended, foundation and all, in the air. We seemed to be
moving slowly over a body of water. Rather suddenly, the whole thing
tipped, like the Tower of Pisa, and angled into the water; soon, we
were submerged. My husband said to me, “Watch out!” – and I
realized that I was in danger of being pinned under the weight of the
sinking house. I managed to follow him out from under the house, and
we swam to shore. In my hand was a key, but it was just an outside
key, not an inside key. All my writing – journals, poems, essays,
everything – was in a sealed box inside the house at the bottom of
the ocean. I no longer had access to any of it. I was really upset by
this: why hadn't I found other places to house my thoughts?
I
was reminded of a series of thematically related dreams I had several
years ago.
In
the spring of 2007, my writing practice was to record my dreams
immediately upon waking and then, later that morning, to turn at
least one dream into a poem. After a couple of weeks of this, I
started to notice that my dreams were changing: more and more, they
were about the creative process.
Here
are two dream poems from that time:
Verisimilitude
The
author has his wares displayed
at
Page 101, a little art gallery downtown
that's
set up like an illustrated encyclopedia.
Most
of his characters are life-sized men
of
monochrome maché doing chest presses
with
cardboard dumbbells painted to match,
too
big for my house, but I could consider
the
smaller, craftier things for sale in the back,
like
ceramic toothbrushes and a flower vase
sculpted
to look like a train engine, very pink.
What
really captivates me is a plate
decorated
with red and yellow pear tomatoes
and
pea pods so green I want to eat them
even
though they're fake -- and look,
see
that pile of peas and unshelled peanuts
on
the shelf, scattered, come unglued?
The
author must have intended
this mess
to
be a mirror for entropy in the world.
Because
I have always longed to own
my
very own metaphor, I check its price
and
discover that what I have picked up
is
an actual peanut, actually just half
an
empty husk, those familiar ridges
on
the brown outside, and on the flipside,
formerly
an inside, those scooped hollows,
each
the right size for the tip of my tongue,
and
each equally worthless to me
because
there is no round-trip ticket
from
what's imagined to what's real.
The
Critique
Whenever
other people's psyches are up for sale
I
love to take the tour, trying on every room
for
size, savoring the delicious pretense
that
I could afford their marble, gilt, and plush.
Your
place is lower-budget than most,
all
low-ceilinged hallways and musty closets.
I
don't want to spend even one night here,
but
I follow along as you push open each door
and
flip light switches on and off, to no avail.
And
then you're gone, and whatever sleeps
under
your washing machine comes slithering out.
I'm
looking right at it, but all I can see for sure
are
the stripes, black and white, writhing:
no
snake skin or rat tail or tarantula leg
could
match this clown kachina black and white,
this
cheap costume stocking stripe, unwinding
on
the floor in front of me while I stand
paralyzed,
backed up against your flimsy wall.
I
can only breathe in, and in, and in again.
I'm
choking on my own voice, swallowing
each
forsaken thought as if it were a balloon
I
could only inflate by speaking it aloud --
And
when I escape from here, the sentence
I
pull out of my mouth will be a perfect copy
of
the unknown creature coiled in your hallway,
each
word a stripe, each space a stripe,
this
pattern that means precisely nothing
until
you tell me how it strikes you.
