Dreamways

DREAM WITH FLOWERS AND BOWL OF FRUIT

Too many of my dreams these days are boring,
I expect to drop into the pillows
and see the kind of action night is for –
a psychic workout, romance, close escapes:
Not much gets accomplished in a still-life;

Nobody looks at asters as a way
to get a taste of life. I want to happen,
not to slightly rearrange my day
nightly in a recurring tablescape.
Dreams! However beautiful the apples,

In February 07, an article appeared in The New York Times about song writer Joni Mitchell's reaction to her small grandson's assertion that "bad dreams are good in the great plan." Ms Mitchell remarked that this wisdom from the mouth of a babe profoundly impacted her. And now, several months later, this phrase appears as the title and basic leitmotif in a poem composed by Ms Mitchell.

 William Meredith (1919 – 30 May 07)  Poet William Meredith has died at the age of 88. His name and poetry were unfamiliar to me until reading his obituary in The New York Times (01 Jun 07). It seems he was a past U.S. Poet laureate as well as a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Certain facts about his life caught my attention in the newspaper’s sizeable obituary.

Bright Enough to Make One Split

It seems that each day exists
to be written and waking is
another yawn of ampersand
and swooning the result
of being held by flesh.

Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison by Ted Kooser. (2000. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press). This is a slim tome of poems written by Mr. Kooser when he was dealing with cancer. After a dark period of no writing, he began composing a short poem a day that he mailed to his friend Jim Harrison. These poems are the journaling of his heart and soul as he contended with illness. The poems are short, they are clean and light, stripped of all excess, much as his life must have felt like at that time.  read more »

Poet Mark Doty writes about buckets of sunflowers seen in a New York street stand:

...
But these foot soldiers of summer - flown
from a Mexican field, boxed north
from Alabama? - neck to neck in an impossible crowd,
they're our double

and mirror: a hundred fierce dawns
up to their hard green waists
in cool water, shocking
in their sameness

and startling again in the shag
variations of their faces dreaming ...
nothing language knows. Though they
are dreaming,

Poet Stanley Kunitz write about: "The Sea That Has No Ending"
Who are we? Why are we here,
huddled on this desolate shore,
so curiously chopped and joined? -
broken totems, a scruffy tribe!
How many years have passed
since we owned keys to a door,
had friends, walked down familiar streets
and answered to a name? We try
not to remember the places
where we left pieces of ourselves
along the way, whether in ditches
at the side of foreign roads  read more »

A waking dream in poetic form by Stanley Kunitz: The Testing Tree

In the recurring dream
my mother stands
in her bridal gown

under the burning lilac,
with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
Russell kissing her hands;

the house behind her is in ruins;
she is wearing an owl's face
and makes barking noises.

Her minatory finger points.
I pass through the cardboard doorway
askew in the field

and peer down a well
where an albino walrus huffs.
He has the gentlest eyes.

This was perhaps my sixth viewing of this movie by Sherman Alexie. I've had very strong emotional responses to this film in the past. As the story of a fellow outsidered in all venues of his life, this movie has always felt particularly relevant to my own story. However, last night's viewing felt less evocative than in the past.

Like as the waves make toward the pebbl’d shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses against his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,  read more »