I tend not
to keep my visions to myself–
I tend to
share them with whoever
will wrap around my dreams
with me,
blanket themselves in my imagination.
I tell them
like a traveling bard
singing of adventures
memorized and set to music
about how
my unconscious mind cycles
(I haven’t been able to pinpoint
any correlation
to lunar cycles
or hormone cycles,
stress or food,
anything,
everything,
nothing.
It cycles at its leisure
like me on a wine-drunk
spring night
on my cruiser,
jingling my bell at raccoons.)
This month
(I might begin
in introduction–mysterious,
engaging)
I’ll dream every night:
vivid,
intricately plotted,
detailed,
engorged-with-emotion-
and-bizarre-imagery
tales
of wonder and woe,
haunting melodies and laconic meanigful phrases–
visions.
Last night,
(I might continue,
lead with an example upon which
I will build my argument)
behind my eyelids,
under my sheets,
within myself,
my slumbering brain
saw with its unseeing eyes
the woods–
not any woods I consciously recall,
not any woods that exist–
Ozarkian and Evergladesian
at once,
dirt roads
not winding but sloping,
sloping up and down–
a roller coaster–
the horizon appearing and disappearing as
the car I’m driving is bouncing
like a cartoon car.
Ahead
on the top of the mountain
an animal tableau:
two cougars ready to fight,
a gigantic donkey,
three timid but curious does watching, waiting.
The bouncing car bounces down to a valley;
the vision is gone.
The bouncing car bounces up to a peak;
the vision emerges again
larger,
looming.
In the dream
(other things
occurred,
and I might recount them
depending upon audience engagement,
but the point is)
I was unsettled
by this strange herd of strange animals
so far away on the hilltop
and so big,
poised in almost combat
but never moving,
stagnant,
intimate in its strangeness and
stillness.
They say
(I might add
for ethos–
scientific credibility
rather than the mystical
nature of
one who dreams often and loud)
you can’t read
words
in dreams.
But I could’ve sworn
(I might add
for pathos, a touch
of the confident but vulnerable)
I read a text message–
or maybe I heard the voice of the person sending it and merely saw a jumble and assumed I had read it–
(I might add for logos,
the rational dreamer)
that assured me the
vision
had been weird
but ultimately had meant nothing–
in fact that the picture I had sent of the scene
was a poorer quality
than the other picture the sender of the text
had also received,
but
I was convinced,
unnerved,
wondering at the
import of the portent.
And I awoke
with foreboding,
(I almost always
end with my waking feelings in
a tidy, pointed conclusion)
a metallic bitterness,
dizzy,
with scratchy eyes
as if I had been allergic to
the woods
or donkey dander.
And so I don’t
keep my visions to myself.
I invite others–
women who come and go,
the rain that washes one clean,
the thunder that only happens when it’s raining–
into my own
silence of remembering.
Tags: fleetwood mac, metaphors and similes, nutty dreams, poetry