The DREAMER
.
There is a laugh that wakes you
from dead sleep-
Snuggled inside of a dream.
The noise unrecognizable from your own throat.
A shameless cackle, half-giggle in heritage
Sits safe in your cords until
this laugh escapes, wakes-
You, a startled deer in your bed, your own
Laugh skipping as with legs across the room-
Shrinking and shirking like an idea
made pointless by someone else’s better idea.
Almost embarrased to have woken yourself up-
as if it wasn’t your own voice that smuggled
a sound out and woke you-
You might look around for a culprit, someone under the comforter-
a loud whisper under the bed, a child in the closet.
And becoming tickeled with the yes! I did this!
This is mine!
You think if you can just-
Just-
Just go back to sleep, you can get that same dream back
and rescue it, bring it back into morning with you,
sit it by your bed and have a conversation with it.
You almost can,
but it’s always some different version of the dream.
Like a new relationship where your new
lover feels like your old lover.
Oh, for The Impossibility of bringing back those losses
that were found again in sleep.
My father is there until the phone rings
Or the cat steps on my face to wake me.
I close my eyes to try to find a way back
Inside the dream with only memory as a map.
How many Wednesdays have I woken to this dream of a dream:
My old neighbor in Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Hit by a Datsun on her way to mass
And how her husband couldn’t function without her.
Walking in circles, dreaming of dreaming-
And the day he married her 56 years earlier, and their red farm,
And the wife before her even.
Startled onto the carpet from his own laugh.
He’d dreamt she was awake and walking again,
sitting in a pew at Queen of Heaven Church.
Except he caught the laugh in time!
Fell back into the dream,
Further and further into it until he was with her in Margate.
There by the sea, on a blanket
wishing for a sandwich
At the exact moment she is pulling one from a wicker basket,
( she knew him like a book)
and they are smiling, and they are laughing the laugh
That will keep waking him.
He is there with her by the sea.
My father is there too.
They are all playing Go-Fish
And the sun is high, burning their shoulders,
And I am smaller than a thought inside my father’s head.
There is an extra sandwich in the basket.
It may start to rain,
Now my father’s parents are there.
They are all there on the beach in New Jersey
Looking down at the Queen of Hearts.
Jen Pastiloff
