A lot of time passed. I wrote in notebooks and on computers and sometimes forgot the words almost as quickly as they moved from my mind onto paper or screen. But yesterday, looking for something, I happened on one of the pieces. Here are a few of the fragments. They feel like suddenly remembered dreams to me. And remembered, they may turn into something. Even poems.
One fragment:
On this night there are only white roses, clusters of moths, wings tangled. Lying in bed, the sheets crumpled around us. I listen to you sleeping, your breath smooth tonight, but I’ve heard it stop, felt for your pulse, which is steady even when your chest is still. I nudge you back to breath. The door slams. We’re both awake now, the candles burning down, how thin the veil between waking and sleeping. It is all, the scientists say, one continuous dream, half remembered.
These characters we’ve chosen. The man in the orange sweater, the lost girl, a man looking up from a hand of cards. I haven’t looked into the closets or under the bed, have not read the medical charts, the e-mails stacking up like layers of skin. We slough them off, slough them up, these flakes of thought, these voices repeating and repeating: I’m here. This is what I’ve seen. it matters because I’ve seen it, sent it to you. As leaves perhaps speak to one another before they fall.
Second fragment:
For too long I have not remembered more than a wisp of a dream, though the night has become familiar, sleep pausing for a moment, then resuming. As if the body needs to reassert itself—solid, resting on a mattress, darkness sifting into the iris as through a funnel. Perhaps the glare of dreaming is too bright and the body squints against it, waking. I long for the bread I remember, the shattering crust and stiff but soft sponge for butter. Before long I’ll ask for the rice balls I believed only she could make, the meatloaf cooked in a skillet, the soup from a can poured into a thermos. It was colder then, the snow hardening enough to support the weight of a girl walking home in the early twilight. Girls were allowed to walk alone then, out to the fields, and up the street until it ended. Alone with the growl of a stomach. Something stops us now, as though the impulse stops at the synapse, dies there without even a note of longing. A bare-chested man sits with his computer, scarcely moving all day. Hungers pushed away. The body ignored so long it begins squalling, making noises as a baby would to get attention.
Third fragment:
I pull the cards. A resurrection. A beginning. A long walk in snow, remembering to look up at the lighted window and to knock on the door of the church where shelter, even beauty, await. Fortunetellers are everywhere. I consult 7 or 8 a day. It’s not normal, the future becoming so much a part of the present that it encroaches, an invasive species. We’re chanting now. Now. Now. But the moment cheats us, or we cheat it. The unpredicted future—the next now. The now of the next heartbeat. A knock at the door. The slamming can’t be fixed. The plumber is due next. Now though, it’s quiet. The heat coming on, the birds in focus again, birdsong. In the murky pond, a dozen enormous koi. Food floats on the surface, but sleep pulls them down. This is where I rest. This is the sleep I seek, the cold water layered above me, cold sinking in.
(The photo is by Dystopos, via Flickr)
